Rome

New Mondadori Bookstore enlivens Rome’s Via Salaria neighbourhood

Thursday, 14 September, Mondadori Store, the largest network of bookstores in Italy, will open a new bookstore in Rome in the heart of the residential neighbourhood of Via Salaria 54. To celebrate the occasion, starting at 6 pm, Marcello Veneziani – journalist and author of numerous essays on philosophy and political culture – will be there to meet readers and sign copies of his book “Vico dei miracoli”,’published by Rizzoli.

The new Mondadori Bookstore covers an area of 140 square metres spread over two floors and three storefronts located on the ground floor. The new opening will expand the already extensive Mondadori Store network in the area, making a new hub dedicated to the world of books, culture and entertainment available to the public.

This is the first opening of journalist Giulia Di Martino’s Mondadori Store affiliate, fulfilling a lifelong dream of hers. “For personal reasons, I moved to Rome from Sicily, where I worked for a local TV station. However, this unexpected change in my life has allowed me to focus on the dream I’ve had since I was a child: to have my own bookstore that could become a meeting place for all the inhabitants of the area, especially the many families that populate the neighbourhood, and to stand as a real cultural hub for the area,” said Giulia di Martino.

A team of experienced anthropologists will support the affiliate in providing the best service to customers at the new Mondadori Bookstore. The bookstore is envisioned as an additional service offered to the local community, making it a meeting place for families and schools in the area.

The new Mondadori Bookstore offers a wide selection of titles, approximately 12,000, ranging from the great classics to fiction, not forgetting young readers with the We are Junior format, which includes educational and illustrated games to stimulate the imagination with interesting stories, and the innovative department dedicated to manga and comics, Just Comics. Also expanding the store’s offerings are areas dedicated to stationery, toys, music, Kobo e-readers, gift cards and gift boxes.

The Mondadori Bookstore in Via Salaria 54 in Rome also serves readers online: customers can keep up-to-date through its Facebook and Instagram pages. They will also be able to get in touch with the bookstore through the Mondadoristore.it digital services to check whether a book is available, order it and pick it up in the store or have it delivered to their home, choosing from a catalogue of more than 1 million titles.

Mondadori Store is the largest network of bookstores in Italy: a cultural organisation active nationwide through more than 500 stores in large cities and small towns alike, and online through the e-commerce website Mondadoristore.it. In addition to offering readers and users its core offer, books, it organises fun experiences, events and multi-channel services, reaching more than 20 million customers each year.

MONDADORI BOOKSTORE
Via Salaria 54 – Rome – Postcode 00019Hours: Mon–Sat 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Email:  mondadorisalaria@gmail.com
Phone: 06.66731269/WhatsApp: +39 334.7489806
https://www.mondadoristore.it/negozi
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“Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” exhibition opens in Rome

From 26 October to 12 February 2023, the exhibition “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

For the first time in Italy, Palazzo Altemps presents an exhibition celebrating the spirit of Bloomsbury, the London district where new forms of life and thought, which transformed the Victorian principles and strong patriarchal spirit with which the twentieth century was still imbued, were developed. After the death of their widowed father in 1904, Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, and her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian moved from the affluent district of Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury. Starting in 1905, a large group of young men and women would meet in the house in 46 Gordon Square to invent a new, free life.

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life is a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house, developed in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery of London. The exhibition highlights the original soul of Palazzo Altemps, an aristocratic mansion in the heart of Rome.

Conceived and curated by Nadia Fusini – a connoisseur of the British author who edited the two volumes in the Meridiani series – in cooperation with Luca Scarlini – writer, playwright, storyteller, performance artist – the exhibition examines the complex intellectual friendships of the Bloomsbury group through books, words, paintings, photographs and the possessions of the protagonists of this adventure in art and thought.

The story of the members of the Bloomsbury circle unfolds in five rooms of Palazzo Altemps. The young intellectuals who met in the home of the Stephen sisters shared artistic predilections, romantic relationships, innovative creative experiences, social thinking. Individuals with strong personalities, they would become left-wing economists, historians, writers, thinkers and painters, and, often, very famous. They dreamed, like Leonard Woolf, of a classless society or, like Virginia, of a world without ivory towers for its artists; John Maynard Keynes revolutionised economic thought and laid the foundation for the welfare state, and for state support of the arts; Lytton Strachey invented a new form of biographical writing, while critic and painter Roger Fry established a different way of looking at and creating works of art. In addition to the undisputed value of equality, economic equality first and foremost, another essential principle for the group was the recognition of the singularity of each individual.

It is no coincidence that the exhibition is housed in Palazzo Altemps, previously home to a prestigious library – built up between the end of the XVI and the XVII centuries by Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps and his nephew Giovanni Angelo, and later merged with the Vatican Apostolic Library – and, in the nineteenth century, to distinguished literary salons. It was here, in the Church of St. Aniceto, built within the fabric of the palazzo, that in 1883 Gabriele D’Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, a daughter of the last family to live in Palazzo Altemps.

Edited by Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini, the exhibition catalogue published by Electa is organised as a personal dairy, a collection of notes and memories, a visual story including essays by distinguished authors, which examines the key themes of the exhibition: the protagonists, their houses, their romantic relationships, their literature, their relations with the arts and publishing, to build up a portrait of one of the most important cultural groups of the twentieth century.

The National Roman Museum with the Electa publishing house and the support of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society have organised a wide-ranging program of events linked to the themes examined by “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome. Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini will meet the public on a series of occasions to talk in depth about and celebrate the fascinating story of the Bloomsbury group.

The exhibition will be open until 12 February 2023. For information about times and tickets:

museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it/palazzo-altemps