Garzanti

Garzanti is one of the oldest and most prestigious of the Italian publishing houses. It took over the legacy of Fratelli Treves Editori, the publishing firm established in 1879 by Emilio and Guido Treves responsible for bringing to Italy’s reading public some of the most prominent names in contemporary Italian literature such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Edmondo De Amicis, Luigi Pirandello and Giovanni Verga. Garzanti relaunched the company, bringing it once again to the forefront of the Italian market. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Garzanti took under its wing Italian writers of the stature of Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Goffredo Parise and Paolo Volponi, as well as Claudio Magris – still one of its top-selling authors – plus important international writers such as William Faulkner and Truman Capote, and a number of poets.

Over the years, Garzanti has also launched many International best-selling authors, among them Michael Crichton. At the beginning of the 1960s, the house created the “Garzantine”, a series of pocket-sized, topical encyclopaedias which were very well received. Garzantine have also been sold as inserts through a collaboration with a number of national newspapers, with overall sales reaching 20 million copies.

In the 1970s, Garzanti launched “Grandi Libri”, the only Italian paperback series devoted exclusively to the classics: it featured high-quality translations, critical appendices, and bibliographies.

To date, the catalogue includes over 600 titles. Garzanti currently publishes many important Italian and foreign writers of fiction: Jorge Amado, Cristina Caboni, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Peter Handke, Joanne Harris, Gail Honeyman, Jamie McGuire, Kenzaburō Ōe, Michael Ondaatje, Clara Sánchez and Andrea Vitali. Its non-fiction list spans various disciplines, from philosophy to literary criticism, religion, media studies, history and current affairs, featuring international authors like Benedetto XVI, the Dalai Lama, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle and Barack Obama, and great Italian writers such as Ferruccio de Bortoli, Vito Mancuso and Nicola Gardini. The prestigious “Collezione Poesia” introduces the work of more recent contemporary Italian poets. Controlled by Messaggerie Italiane since 1998 and under new management from 2003, Garzanti has discovered a new lease of life and strengthened its position in the market. Since 2006, Garzanti has been wholly owned by the GeMS group.