Attendees at the 2025 Thessaloniki International Book Fair enter, as Italy makes its guest of honor appearance. Image: Courtesy BCBF
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Cipolletta in Greece: ‘To Build Bridges and Sharing’
As the 19th edition of Greece’s Thessaloniki International Book Fair has opened today (May 8), Italy is the show’s guest of honor—only months after its turn in that role at Frankfurter Buchmesse in October 2024.
In fact, Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE), makes the point that Italy can be seen in several parts of the world in the next months.
Innocenzo Cipolletta
“After Guest of Honor Italy in Frankfurt in 2024,” Cipolletta says, “in 2025 our country will be guest of honor on three continents. We were first in Asia, at the Taipei International Book Exhibition; this month we’re here in Greece; and then in July, we’ll be in South America, in Lima.
“The Italian book industry stubbornly continues to build bridges and share in a world in which the temptation to raise walls is ever stronger,” Cipolletta says.
“We share a long history of exploration and hospitality with Greece. Ours will be a meeting between people who share the same values .”
With a delegation of 50 speakers and 16 publishers, Italy has arrived in Greece with more than one exhibition and a cultural program of events for the four-day public-facing show at the TIF-HelExpo exhibition center through Sunday (May 11).
Paulo Cucilo
This evening’s opening event has featured both Cipolletta and Rome’s ambassador to Athens, Paulo Cuculi, who said at the event, “This is an opportunity of exceptional visibility for Italy in Greece, which allows us to celebrate the tradition of intense cultural exchanges between two countries that have always been able to make literature a powerful tool for external projection and dialogue.
“The important participation of Italian authors and publishing houses in Thessaloniki testifies to the extent of the mutual interest that exists between our two countries in culture and publishing. This celebrates the profound influence that Italy brings to these fields.”
The guest of honor program features a stand covering 200 square meters (2,510 square feet), including space for the operation of the Konstantinidis bookstore and a seating area for one-on-one business meetings.
Inside the Italian pavilion, visitors will be able to admire the exhibition I colori dell’antico (Colors of Antiquity) – organized by the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in collaboration with AIE, a review of Italian illustrators who have given new forms and new colors to the classical world, declining the strong appeal that ancient art still exerts according to classical and digital techniques and pop coloring.
In other spaces of the fair, two other exhibitions will be set up: Hugo Pratt: l’eredità, l’opera, la biografia–curated by Patrizia Zanotti to pay homage through 27 large panels retracing his career; and Camilleri 1925-2025, which as part of Camilleri 100–created around the centenary of the birth of Sicily’s Andrea Camilleri, texts, images and quotes curated by Giovanni Capecchi.
More on the guest of honor Italy plans for the Thessaloniki International Book Fair is on this page.
AIE president Innocenza Cipolletta speaks at the opening of the Thessaloniki International Book Fair. Image: AIE
Also at Thessaloniki: IPA Vice-President Giovanni Hoepli
Representing the International Publishers Association‘ (IPA), the association’s recently named vice-president, the publisher Giovanni Hoepli—an Italian, as it happens—gave a welcoming comment, as well, one of the first of his onstage events in his new role with IPA. Hoepli said, in part:
“We must insist on a fair foundation: transparency on training data and respect for copyright.
Giovanni Hoepli
“The works of our authors—and our investments—cannot be used by AI without consent and adequate remuneration. What makes book fairs so special are these opportunities for us all to meet, to talk, to discover books from other cultures, with different visions. Our books are very much ‘Created by Humans’ as this fair’s theme would have it.
“We live in an age of disinformation. But as publishers, unlike the tech giants, we take responsibility for what we publish. We support deep, critical reading, which allows citizens to understand complex realities. And we defend the freedom to publish—because democracy requires the free exchange of diverse and even uncomfortable ideas.
“Democracy depends on reading. And therefore, democracy depends on the written word and—on all of us who ensure that books, knowledge, and ideas remain accessible and diverse. I hope we can all agree on that as a ‘Shared Horizon,’ to borrow the Italian guest of honor motto.
“For me, Greece is not just the cradle of democracy. It’s also a place of deep personal meaning. My uncle, Franco Saibene, fought for democratic values here during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, my family has spent decades returning to Greece — it has become a second home. My uncle’s ashes now rest in the Aegean Sea, as he wished. So being here today is especially meaningful.”
“Democracy depends on reading. And therefore, democracy depends on the written word and—on all of us who ensure that books, knowledge, and ideas remain accessible and diverse. I hope we can all agree on that as a ‘Shared Horizon,’ to borrow the Italian guest of honor motto.
Members of the Italian guest of honor delegation to the 2025 Guest of Honor program. Image: AIE
Italy’s First Quarter, 2025
As it turns out, the Italian delegation may be glad to enjoy the boost of the weekend’s Thessaloniki fair.
The first quarter of this year has not produced the kind of marketplace numbers the publishers of the AIE might like to take to Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (May 15 to 19).
More on the Italian book industry and market is here, more on the Guest of Honor Italy program at Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, and more on the Thessaloniki International Book Fair is here.