The 37th Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino runs May 15 to 19 with a return of its rights center and Aficionado Award program.
Set this year for May 15 to 19, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino has announced details of its programming and plans, with the Netherlands as its guest of honor market.
Just to hit a point of clarification that continues to escape many, the city’s name is Torino, and this is the name officially preferred in Italy. This is why the 2006 Winter Olympic Games were played in “Torino,” not the anglicized “Turin.” (The Taurini, a Celto-Ligurian tribe, were in the River Po area peopled the area as far back as the Iron Age, giving rise eventually to the name Torino.)
And the Torino book fair is an interesting example of the trend toward public-facing book events developing “professional program” elements too anchor themselves both in service to their markets and to a bigger publicity footprint—the professional news media read by the book industry can offer more coverage to professionally engaged fairs than they can to the basic “book festival” format which targets consumers as its patrons.
For a second year, the Salone is under the direction of Annalena Benini, who had a much-praised outing in 2024, her first turn at being in the top seat.
This year’s fair is expected to comprise some 137,000 square meters (1.5 million square feet), with more than 700 stands, 51 venues for presentations and events, and some 220 hours of workshops. There are also to be nearly 2,000 events on-site and some 500 off-site in what’s called the “Salone Off” program, the sort of outreach efforts that many fairs are good at making to their local communities. This year, the venues will include the 18,000-seat auditorium at the Lingotto Congress Center.
The Torino fair is also blessed with an ethos of earnest publicity and communication, forthrightly calling itself “Italy’s largest public-facing fair looking forward to opening its doors to publishers, authors, and, above all, readers.”
This is healthy. It is, after all, the groundwork of the industry to get books into the hands of consumers, and the “professional program” trend—along with the trend of calling everything “international”—can easily mislead some event organizers to stress the professional programming over the critically important nature of this type of consumer-oriented event.
The theme of this 37th year of the Salone del Libro is Words Fall Lightly Between Us. That phrase is used as a tribute to novelist Lalla Romano, who died in 2001 at age 94. Romano had been inspired by the work of poet Eugenio Montale (1895 to 1981).
At the fair, the French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is expected to lead an event making the theme official.
Another feature this year is a “romance pop-up,” a space said to be “dedicated to meet-and-greet activities with names in the romance genre, adding 11 extra venues.
A new Publishers Center is to open this year, described as a lounge area in which one-on-one meetings will be held between publishers, booksellers, and/or “influencers.”
While the Netherlands is guest country of honor, the southern Italian administrative region Campania is to be “guest region,” an area perhaps best known for its stunning Amalfi Coast.
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Article courtesy of Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives
Photo: At the 2024 Salone Internazionale del Libro Torino/ Image SILT
