The appointment with the Salone returns every year in May at Lingotto, the famous Fiat plant with the spiral ramp and roof-top test track, a masterpiece of industrial archaeology. Designed between 1915 and 1922 and admired by Le Corbusier, since 1985 it has been transformed by Renzo Piano into an exhibition, conference and commercial centre.

In 2007 the Salone celebrated its 20th anniversary. With six pavilions, an area of 51,000 square metres, 27 conference rooms, over 1,400 publishers and about 300,000 visitors in the five days it is open, it is today the largest fair in Italy dedicated to publishing, reading and culture, and one of the leaders in Europe.
The 23rd Salone Internazionale del Libro will be held from Thursday 13 to Monday 17 May 2010.

The history of the Salone has been one of growing success. A 30% increase in visitors in 2006, dozens of new exhibitors every year, more and more international publishers who come to Torino. Figures that buck the trend of the widespread crisis for events for the general public.

The secret is a formula that blends harmoniously different components, and which makes it unique both in the panorama professional fairs, and in the galaxy of cultural and literary festivals that have sprung up all over the place in recent years.

The Salone is first and foremost Italy's largest bookshop. An endless series of bookshelves where the general public can make surprising discoveries, come across the most enticing and curious books, unfindable volumes and the latest publications. A showcase where small and medium-sized publishers have the same visibility as the big players and where local publishers can make themselves known outside their own territory.
At the same time, the Salone is also a lively international festival of culture, a can't-be-missed appointment that draws enthusiasts from all over Italy. Over one thousand conferences, meetings debates and shows with more than 2,000 speakers and guests: Nobel prize winners, writers, scientists, philosophers, historians, journalists and artists. The brightest minds of the contemporary world, tackling the big questions of how to understand the challenges of the society that we live in. A debate always conducted in a spirit of respect and of dialogue with the culture and ideas of others.
The Salone is also the main point of reference for book professionals in Italy: publishers, booksellers, librarians, agents, illustrators and translators. In 2007 this is a role that was recognised at the worldwide level by the authoritative American trade newsletter Publishing Trends.

Two sections of the Salone are dedicated entirely to the trade: the International Book Forum for the exchange of publishing and translation rights, and the Book Film Bridge for the audiovisual adaptation of literary works. Since 2007 there has also been the Incubator, to help young publishers make themselves known, and the Italian Fellowship Program, which has offered numerous international publishers the opportunity to visit and get to know the main Italian publishers with a 15 day tour.

The origins: the Salone del Libro.

The Salone was founded in 1988 from an idea by two Torinesi: the bookseller Angelo Pezzana and the entrepreneur Guido Accornero. It was held at Torino Esposizioni.
The logo, a book that opens invitingly like a door, was designed by Armando Testa. Since 2007 it has been adopted again as the symbol of Portici di Carta: the world's longest bookshop under the arcades of the centre of Torino, organised together with the Presidi del Libro in the framework of the National Readers' Festival.
Right from the outset, the Book Fair has been characterised by an annual theme. A clever idea, a thread that unites the most important conferences that inaugurated tradition that has lasted until today. The theme of the first edition was "Short instructions to find your way". That of 2009 is "Self and the Others".

To baptise the Salone was the Russian poet Josif Brodskij. The recent Nobel Prize winner (1987), commented: "The idea of holding a book fair in the city where a century ago Friedrich Nietzsche lost the light of reason is an enlightened idea with a pinch of madness".

The first edition in figures: 100,000 visitors, 3,600 professionals, 958 teachers, 553 exhibitors. The Salone immediately became a destination of great standing: Jacques Derrida, Claudio Magris, Jorge Amado, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Umberto Eco, Nikita Mikhalkov, Nadine Gordimer, Renzo Piano, Salvatore Sciarrino, Federico Zeri. Alongside them were names of great popular and media appeal.

The appointment was appreciated and repeated each year, with growing success with both publishers and the public. It soon moved to the newly restored Lingotto. From 1993, the edition dedicated to "What is true, what is false", the cultural director was Beniamino Placido.

The evolution: the Fiera del Libro.

To overcome the growing economic and organisational difficulties of the private owners of the brand, in 1999 the Salone was taken over by Regione Piemonte, Provincia di Torino and Città di Torino, which entrusted the promotion and cultural project to the Fondazione per il Libro, la Musica e la Cultura.

The event changed name and became the Fiera del Libro. The General Secretary of the foundation, and since 2006 the president was Rolando Picchioni: a former under-secretary for Cultural Heritage, speaker of the Regional Council of Piemonte and of the Teatro Stabile of Torino, with a long and prestigious background as a cultural organiser. To run the Fair, Picchioni called on the writer Ernesto Ferrero, a Turin intellectual who worked for many years for the publishers Einaudi and Mondadori.

The young Fair immediately found the backing of most Italian publishers. This consensus enabled it to fight off attacks from those who wanted to take it away from Torino, closer to the geographical heart of the book industry. The 1999 edition was an extraordinary success, with 190,987 visitors, 19,079 trade professionals, 10,966 teachers, 825 exhibitors.
The Fair thus also became a fundamental element in the metamorphosis of Torino from a factory town to a service city, from a metropolis of material production to a capital of culture, knowledge and innovation.

The Fair grows and innovates.

A new recognition for the Book Fair arrived in 2002. The event became International. It strengthened its bonds with the world and reinforced the sectors for the trade with two new areas: the International Book Forum, dedicated to the negotiation of publishing and translation rights, and the Book Film Bridge, for the cinema and television adaptations of works of literature.

The Fair inaugurated the tradition of hosting a different guest country every year, present with its own stand, authors and publishers, exhibitions, shows, artists, special insights and in-depth presentations. Catalonia, Holland, Switzerland, Canada, Greece, Brazil, Portugal, Lithuania and Israel have followed one after the other since 2001. Egypt will be the protagonist in 2009.

On the back of the success of the first edition of Terra Madre (the meeting of the world's communities of food producers and processors at the 2004 Salone del Gusto), Lingua Madre was founded in 2005. This is the Fair's global heart, a new identity card for the event.
The writers of the world's minority and "poor" languages, the migrant authors who choose to express themselves in the major international languages or in the languages of the countries of arrival photograph a globalised planet where books and literature return to the centre of changing notions and forms of identity and sense of belonging. Among them are many "new Italians".

The role of the Fair was further consecrated by UNESCO, which in 2004 proclaimed Torino World Book Capital for 2006-2007, assigning a title already awarded to Madrid, Alexandria, New Delhi, Antwerp and Montréal, and later taken up by Bogotà and Amsterdam. The year of Torino World Book Capital with its 848 events for the promotion of books and reading, and the boost from the 20th Olympic Winter Games, saw the number of visitors in 2006 shoot up to 304,000.
Return to the future.

Today, the International Book Fair is confirmed as a vital window on the state of health of books and reading in Italy, and more in general as the natural crossroads for understanding the role of Italian culture and creativity in the new scenarios of a world going through profound change.

And a return to the future, not only symbolically, is the recovery of the original name. From 2010 the event will return to the name Salone Internazionale del Libro, to underline its cultural vocation and the continuity that has never been abandoned.

Among the challenges that await it is that of getting closer to weak readers and non-readers, also experimenting with educational applications of the new media and new technologies. These are not necessarily "enemies" of reading, but potential allies in the integration between cultures and the civic education of the new generations.

Among the Fair's guests...

Salvatore Accardo, Adonis, Susanna Agnelli, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Roberto Alajmo, Antonio Albanese, Giorgio Albertazzi, Fouad Khaled Allam, Magdi Allam, Giovanni Allevi, Jorge Amado, Radouan Amara, Niccolò Ammaniti, Aharon Appelfeld, Alberto Arbasino, Renzo Arbore, Nadeem Aslam, Alberto Asor Rosa, Marc Augé, Avion Travel, Maurice Aymard, Shalom Bahbout, John Banville, Alessandro Baricco, Miguel Barnet, John D. Barrow, Pierluigi Battista, Pippo Baudo, Zygmunt Bauman, Allan Bay, Olivero Beha, Marco Belpoliti, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Alessandro Bergonzoni, Edmondo Berselli, Enzo Biagi, Enzo Bianchi, Daria Bignardi, Remo Bodei, Guido Bolaffi, Edoardo Boncinelli, Mike Bongiorno, Yves Bonnefoy, Aldo Bonomi, Mario Botta, Rachid Boudjedra, Franco Branciaroli, Dionne Brand, Enrico Brizzi, Josif Brodskij, Geraldine Brooks, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, Massimo Cacciari, Roberto Calasso, Andrea Camilleri, Mimmo Càndito, Luciano Canfora, Candido Cannavò, Vinicio Capossela, Antonio Caprarica, Luca Carboni, Franco Cardini, Massimo Carlotto, Gianluca Cascioli, Igor Cassina, Luca L. Cavalli Sforza, Giorgio Celli, Vincenzo Cerami, Javier Cercas, Guido Ceronetti, Patrick Chamoiseau, Daniel Chavarria, Malek Chebel, Yuri Chechi, Abdesselam Cheddadi, Marcello Cin, Pietro Citati, Hugo Claus, Johnatan Coe, Paulo Coelho, Furio Colombo, Renata Colorni, Cristina Comencini, Christos Comenidis, Raphael Confiant, Giovanni Conso, Vincenzo Consolo, Alberto Conte, Paolo Conte, Mauro Corona, Francesco Cossiga, Maurizio Costanzo, Youssef Courbage, Benedetta Craveri, Clive Cussler, Ralf Dahrendorf, Mahmoud Darwish, Masolino D'Amico, Andrea De Carlo, Luciano De Crescenzo, Oreste Del Buono, Daniele Del Giudice, Alessandro Del Piero, Erri De Luca, Tullio De Mauro, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Dunne, Umberto Eco, Ludovico Einaudi, Elisa, Alain Elkann, Peter Esterházy, Ildefonso Falcones, Fabio Fazio, José Pablo Feinmann, Gian Arturo Ferrari, Davide Ferrario, Joachim Fest, Dario Fo, Goffredo Fofi, Richard Ford, Philippe Forest, Frei Betto, Carlo Fruttero, Cesare Garboli, Laurent Gaudé, Arno Geiger, Alicia Gimenez Bartlett, Nadine Gordimer, Aldo Grasso, Ugo Gregoretti, Tullio Gregory, Vittorio Gregotti, David Grossman, Lilli Gruber, Arnon Grunber, Francesco Guccini, Bernard Guetta, Margherita Hack, Claude Hagège, Joanne Harris, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Yu Hua, Samuel Huntington, Riccardo Illy, Luce Irigaray, Fleur Jaeggy, Abdul Kader El Janabi, Robert Jordan, Vladimir Kaminer, Etgar Keret, Samir Khalil, Michel Khleifi, Julia Kristeva, Raffaele La Capria, Vytautas Landsbergis, Tom Lanoye, Joe Lansdale, Bjorn Larrson, Gabriele Lavia, Claudio Leonardi, Gad Lerner, Gilles Leroy, Ron Leshem, Roy Lichtenstein, Ligabue, Luciana Littizzetto, Elena Loewenthal, Rosetta Loy, Carlo Lucarelli, Mario Luzi, Emanuele Luzzati, Denis Mack Smith, Miriam Mafai, Maurizio Maggiani, Claudio Magris, Danilo Mainardi, Igor Man, Norman Manea, Valerio M. Manfredi, Renato Mannheimer, Dacia Maraini, Gualtiero Marchesi, Javier Marías, Petros Markaris, Yann Martel, Samir Marzouki, Richard Mason, Predrag Matveijevic', Paolo Mauri, Ezio Mauro, Margaret Mazzantini, Melania Mazzucco, Piero Meldini, Piero Melograni, Rigoberta Menchù, Alda Merini, Khalida Messaoudi, Reinhold Messner, Sami Michael, Nikita Michalkov, André Michaux, Paolo Mieli, Michele Mirabella, Ettore Mo, Vincenzo Mollica, Leonardo Mondadori, Indro Montanelli, Gianni Morandi, Benny Morris, Harry Mulisch, Les Murray, Alexandre Najjar, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Mikael Niemi, Raffaele Nigro, Cees Nooteboom, Aldo Nove, Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Margherita Oggero, Ben Okri, Piero Ostellino, Nico Orengo, Uri Orlev, Carlo Ossola, Moni Ovadia, Ferzan Ozpetek, Arto Paasilinna, Boris Pahor, Orhan Pamuk, Tim Parks, Paolo Pejrone, Daniel Pennac, Silvio Perrella, Carla Perrotti, Max Pezzali, Renzo Piano, Santo Piazzese, Daniel Picouly, Nicola Piepoli, Enrico Pieranunzi, Andrea Pininfarina, Renata Pisu, Beniamino Placido, Giuseppe Pontiggia, Folco Portinari, Anna Powar, Elisabetta Pozzi, Giorgio Pressburger, Folco Quilici, Noa Rabin, Giovanni Raboni, Atiq Rahimi, Tariq Ramadan, Federico Rampini, Massimo Ranieri, Mario Rasetti, Edoardo Raspelli, Elisabetta Rasy, Anita Rau Badami, Giancarlo Ravasi, Lidia Ravera, Ermanno Rea, Giovanni Reale, Tullio Regge, Ennio Remondino, Patrick Reynald, Mario Rigoni Stern, Antonio Ricci, Gianni Riotta, Dino Risi, Marco Rizzo, Antonella Ruggiero, Camillo Ruini, Gian Enrico Rusconi, Edoardo Sanguineti, Francesca Sanvitale, Giovanni Sartori, Carlos Saura, Fernando Savater, Dionisis Savvopoulos, Eugenio Scalfari, Tiziano Scarpa, Arthur Schlesinger jr., Eric-Emanuel Schmitt, Salvatore Sciarrino, Antonio Scurati, Giuseppe Sergi, Vittorio Sermonti, Michele Serra, Salvatore Settis, Emanuele Severino, Vittorio Sgarbi, Meir Shalev, Eyal Sivan, Antonio Skármeta, Madison Smartt Bell, Wilbur Smith, Barbara Spinelli, Domenico Starnone, George Steiner, Gian Antonio Stella, Vikas Swarup, Wislawa Szymborska, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Susanna Tamaro, Gian Maria Testa, Samir Thanasis Chimonas Frank J. Tipler, Oliviero Toscani, Lea Tsemel, Irena Vaisvilaite, Sebastiano Vassalli, Roberto Vecchioni, Walter Veltroni, Marcello Veneziani, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Gore Vidal, Paolo Villaggio, Paolo Virzì, Dario Voltolini, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Vreeland, Derek Walcott, Christa Wolf, Mo Yan, Abraham Yehoshua, Mesut Yilmaz, Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Mohsen Zahran, Feridun Zaimoglu, Paul Zanker, Lilia Zaouali, Sergio Zavoli, Stefano Zecchi, Federico Zeri.