The Piu Libri, Piu Liberi book festival took place December 4–8 in Rome. The festival—Italy’s third largest, after the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the Turin International Book Fair—was at the Palazzo dei Congressi, part of Mussolini’s Universal Exposition (EUR), built in 1942 and intended for the World’s Fair. The festival, which translates as more books, more freedom, hosted 359 presenters and drew a crowd of 56,000 industry professionals and consumers.

The fair, organized by the Association of Independent Publishers (AIE) and the Italian Trade Agency (ITA), is primarily designed to showcase titles from small- and mid-size publishers. Among the houses taking advantage of the opportunity were Sellerio Editore, who held a signing by bestselling mystery writer Andrea Camilleri, and Nutrimenti, who held signings for American author Percival Everett. At the Bao booth, graphic novelist Zerocalcare spent hours autographing copies of his newest bestseller, Dimenticata il mio nome. Also present was Edizioni E/O, publisher of bestselling novelist Elena Ferrante; Minimum Fax, publisher of Jennifer Egan’s novels; Edizioni Sonda, which publishes vegan and vegetarian cookbooks; and Tsunami Edizione, which has a full list of metal and rock music books.

This year’s fair was also part of a larger effort to bring more international attention to Italian publishing. Several years ago the ITA established a task force to create ways to give different sectors of Italian publishing more visibility among foreign publishers. The projects include a website (italbooks.com) that lists more than 240 publishers and 1,100 titles. To help bring more international and national attention to Rome’s book festival, the ITA invited 65 fellows to the fair—40 publishers from Italy and 25 from Europe, Brazil, Canada, and the U.S. In order to better understand the market for books translated from Italian, Matteo Picariello, trade commissioner of ITA’s Chicago office, invited Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, to research Italian translations in the U.S. market and to present a report. One of Post’s more notable findings was that the top 10 American publishers of literature in translation published 482 books between the start of 2012 and September 2014, only 41 of which were translated from Italian. Post notes that “these fellowships are a great start for building a network between American and Italian editors” and hopes that they will lead to more translations.

The conference began with a series of sessions that looked at the state of Italian publishing in 2014. Piero Attanasio, of the AIE, explained that Italy ranks eighth in the world in terms of the number of titles published annually, with China and the U.S. leading the pack. The 68,121 titles released in 2013 (a number that excludes e-books and self-published works) marked a 23% increase over title output in 2000, and there are now approximately 813,000 titles in print in Italy. According to the AIE research department, book sales in Italy fell 4.7% in 2013, compared to 2012. Italy’s six largest publishers(Mondadori, RCS, GeMS, Giunt, Feltrinelli, De Agostini) account for 60% of sales, making it all the more important to promote small publishers in the international market. Within the Italian market, chain and independent bookstores combined to account for 73% of sales last year, while online retailers—the biggest channel in the U.S.—accounted for 12% of sales.

The research also found that Italians read less than other Europeans, with only 43% of Italy’s population reading one book or more per year. And despite the large market share of bricks-and-mortar stores in Italy, the country is facing an issue familiar to American booksellers and publishers: the disappearance of bookstores, especially in cities of 50,000–80,000 inhabitants.