Italy-Russia:Conference on Venice and Modern Publishing in Moscow

Moscow - Appointment with Alessandro Marzo Magno's conference on "Venice and the Birth of Modern Publishing" in the Musejon Center of the "Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts" in Moscow on Thursday July 27. Alessandro Marzo Magno, born and bred in Venice, Venice University graduate in History of Venice Region, with ten years of reporting for the "Diario" weekly under his belt, will be retracing the history of printing, illustrating the central role played by Venice during the first fifty years of the 16th century. Movable type printing was invented by a German, Gutenberg, in 1455. Fifty years of so later, an Italian, Aldo Manuzio, invented the book as we know it today.

This happened in Venice. In the first half of the 1500s, the city was the European publishing capital: nearly half of all books published in Europe were printed there. Not all books were in Italian. The variety of languages was astonishing to today's standards: the first book in Greek (1486), the first book in Armenian (1512) and the first book in Bosnian Cyrillic (1512) were all printed in Venice. After the Ottoman conquest of Montenegro, an aristocratic courtier called Bozidar Vukovic moved to Venice where he starting printed liturgical texts for the Serbian church, which he then smuggled into Ottoman-controlled territory, in 1519. The one in Venice will remain the only Serbian press in the world until well into the 1600s. Worth mentioning is also the printing of the first Talmud (1524) and of the first Quran in Arabic (1538).

Venice had the money needed to open presses, the commercial contacts to make the volumes published in the various languages travel and a substantial colony of foreigners, who could provide the skills for composing and correcting the texts in the various languages. Above all, Venice had freedom. During the first fifty years of the 16th century anything could be published in Venice, including the writings of the German reformists that the Catholic Church would have wanted to burn at the stake. When freedom was lost and monetary availability decreased, the Italian city was forced to surrender the publishing primacy to the Flanders: Antwerp first and then Amsterdam.