by Rose Facchini
Anna Ferrando is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her work explores the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, focusing chiefly on twentieth-century cultural mediators. She edited a volume on translations under Fascism, Stranieri all’ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce: Translations During Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019). She recently published a history of the Adelphi publishing house, titled Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938–1994) [Adelphi: The Origins of a Publishing House, 1938–1994] (Carocci, 2023). Her interview with Rose Facchini explores all of these themes, centering on Ferrando’s Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book Hunters: Literary Agents under Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019), which was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History.
Rose Facchini: Your study foregrounds the establishment of the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (ALI) as a pivotal moment in the professionalization of literary mediation in Italy. How did the figure of the literary agent in Italy evolve from the agency’s founding in the late nineteenth century through the interwar period?
Anna Ferrando: As in England, which led the way, Italian practices of literary agency developed alongside the industrialization of publishing. Literary agents began to operate informally around 1898 with the founding of the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (ALI) under Augusto Foà. Unlike archetypal British literary agencies, the ALI focused on representing foreign authors, works, books, and publishers. It mediated between the Italian cultural sphere and the international publishing market.
In Italy, a national media system and more structured publishing industry developed in the 1920s and 1930s. It was during this period that media and publishing, driven partly by the nascent translation industry, became more widespread across the country. That is why I argue that the 1930s, the era of totalitarianism—not only in Italy but across Europe—paradoxically provided the political and cultural conditions in which literary agents could take root as transnational mediators.
Literary agents were and are key players in what we might call “print capitalism.” They could operate even under Fascism, and their growing presence complicated the publishing industry’s professional relationships and power dynamics. While many publishers resisted the entry of this new player into the field, many others were receptive, especially in northern Italy and, above all, Milan. During the 1930s, Milan emerged as the capital of transnational literature in Italy, causing many Italian literary agents to relocate there during that period. Mondadori, one of Italy’s most influential literary publishers, was based in Milan and welcomed collaboration with the ALI. The latter’s knowledge of the international market and fluency in many foreign languages made it a valuable partner, especially as Mondadori actively sought to publish foreign literature.
RF: To what extent do you see the ALI as contributing to a form of cultural modernism that was in tension with or resistant to the regime’s nationalist narrative? To what degree did this agency’s operations, however constrained, contradict the dominant ideology of the regime, that might have been?
AF: In the interwar through postwar periods, the expanding profession of literary agency across Europe and the United States helped to introduce Anglophone literature and then reinforce its growing dominance. While the ALI also had unusually strong ties with literary agents in Northern Europe, its importation of Anglophone literature—humbly beginning with translations for newspaper appendices in their early days—was particularly groundbreaking. Their efforts contributed to the overtaking of French literature by its English and American counterparts in the 1930s, a critical decade for Italian literary culture.
Through this process, which was driven by the work of literary agents, Italian readers were introduced to modernist literature, an important cultural innovation. ALI founder Augusto Foà maintained strong ties with Britain and, later, the US. One of ALI’s early collaborators was James Pinker, a pioneering British literary agent who discovered major modernist authors like Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Richard Aldington.
While ALI and other international literary agents promoted cultural exchange, many of their projects were blocked or unrealized due to political constraints. Joyce is a great example. His work was censored in Italy because it portrayed a form of masculinity that clashed with the Fascist ideal. For historians, such failed or censored efforts are revealing. They shed light on both the agents’ transnational cultural aims and the regime’s attempts to control and suppress certain forms of literary expression.
RF: How did Fascist literary censorship evolve over time? How did the agency’s strategies for selecting and promoting foreign texts respond to these shifting ideological pressures?
AF: In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, censorship was far more centralized and severe than it was in Fascist Italy, especially when it came to translations. In Italy, the process evolved more slowly and unevenly over time. As a former teacher and journalist, Mussolini understood the power of words to shape national identity. Censorship under Fascism was deeply tied to the regime’s cultural project—the creation of the “new man” and “new woman,” for instance.
Gradually, the regime became increasingly concerned with protecting racial and national identity. From 1928 onward, as Giorgio Fabre has shown, overtly anti-Fascist content faced censorship, and whiteness became central to the state’s vision of Italian identity. Ironically, during the 1930s, despite intensifying nationalism—Italy became the world’s largest consumer of translated literature, according to League of Nations data studied by scholars like Christopher Rundle. The ALI played a key role in this, often bargaining with the regime to publish foreign titles, even controversial ones.
Structurally, we can mark three major turning points in Fascist literary censorship. The first one was 1934, with the introduction of preventive censorship. This coincided with preparations for the Ethiopian invasion. That year, the novel Sambadù amore negro by Mura (Maria Volpi Nannipieri), previously published by Italian publisher Rizzoli, was censored for its depiction of an interracial relationship—an early sign of racism influencing publishing policy. Second, in 1937, there was the first official document targeting the translation of foreign works. Lastly, in 1938, the regime put racial laws into place and created the Commission for the Purging of Books [Commissione per la bonifica libraria], which sought to eliminate Italian publishing of foreign and Jewish authors. It was only with these laws and the outbreak of World War II, which led to the association of foreign literature with enemy influence, that Fascist Italy began practicing truly systematic censorship.
Prior to that, Fascist censorship showed considerable leeway and unpredictability in what was allowed or censored. Individual censors could exercise significant discretion, and their criteria were often ambiguous, even if loosely marked on their perimeter by recurring themes like nationalism, racism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, misogyny and patriarchy. Whether or not a given text faced censorship followed from contingent negotiations between the regime and publishers, who mediated literary agents’ interactions with the state. These negotiations cannot be reduced to the degree of conflict between a text’s values or perspectives, no matter how disguised by Italian translation and the regime’s ideology. For instance, Richard Aldington’s Women Must Work (1934), a book about the British feminist movement, was translated into Italian as Le donne devono lavorare in 1936, just as Fascist imperialism peaked with the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. However, that same year another Aldington novel that also depicted a woman’s emancipation, The Colonel’s Daughter (1931), was banned by the Fascist regime. So, agencies like the ALI still continued to operate in the face of increased censorship, navigating the complex and often contradictory cultural policies of the regime. Their efforts shed light on the layered nature of censorship and cultural exchange under Fascism.
RF: How did you reach this topic, and how does your research shift the methodological terrain for scholars studying transnational literary history or the sociology of texts? What archival challenges does this approach present?
AF: My dissertation had brought me to related actors and themes. I was investigating translators in publishing houses during the fascist regime. In that era, the translation business became a kind of “refuge” for many journalists or professors who did not want to align themselves with the policies of the regime. The specific idea for this book, however, arose somewhat serendipitously. I was reading a newspaper article about Andrea Camilleri, a well-known author of crime novels, and it mentioned his literary agent. That made me wonder when exactly the literary agent emerged as an occupation. As a historian, I wanted to trace the origins of this hidden but influential role.
When I began this project, there was very little historical scholarship on literary agents. Only a few works explored the topic elsewhere, such as Cécile Cottenet’s Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade and Mary Ann Gillies’s The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920. Among historians, Robert Darnton stood out for recognizing the historiographical significance of translations and literary agents as cultural mediators. In Italy, there were no studies at all, so the lack of historiography was my first major challenge.
I soon came across the ALI, but the next question was archival: do any sources survive? Fortunately, I found a rich archive at the Fondazione Mondadori in Milan, which is an essential resource for publishing historians. Although most of the ALI materials dated from after World War II, I discovered mislabeled boxes marked “1940s” that actually contained documents from the 1930s, exactly the period I was interested in. The documents primarily consisted of contracts, copyright records, and correspondence—dry and technical, but full of hidden stories! My task was to make them speak—to transform legal and bureaucratic material into a narrative of cultural mediation and transnational exchange.
Here, Anna Lanfranchi’s method for analyzing copyright documents to study translations provided something of a model. By analyzing technical documents, I was able to map out networks of agents, publishers, authors, translators, and even lesser-known figures like book scouts and cultural intermediaries across Europe and the Atlantic. I also discovered crucial early correspondence between ALI and the Corriere della Sera newspaper, which showed that, before it worked with publishers, the ALI got its start in turn-of-the-century Turin by selling serialized fiction to newspapers. These documents made clear just how embedded literary agents were in that era’s broader systems of print capitalism and media. Piece by piece, I was able to reconstruct the ALI’s national and international networks and to begin telling a richer story of how culture moved across borders during a politically chaotic era.
RF: Were there any letters that were particularly interesting? One that was a pivotal point on which your research hinged?
AF: I found a letter in the private Foà archives (preserved by Anna Foà) that I quoted at the beginning of my book (p. 27). It was a kind of memoir in which Luciano Foà, son of the ALI’s founder, reflected on the origins of his career. Unlike the formal contracts and legal papers I had been working with, this letter was personal and full of warmth. Luciano recalled, as a child, watching his father work at a desk every Saturday and Sunday, wherever they went. Only later did he realize that his father had been translating serialized novels for newspapers.
His description painted a vivid image: a man sitting at his desk late into the night, typing out translations of stories imported from England and Germany. Such an intimate portrait offers something that usually escapes Italian historical research: the humanity behind the archival record. This letter allowed me to better understand both father and son and to follow their path more intimately. It gave me a glimpse into the emotional and human side of a profession that, at the time, did not really exist yet. They were inventing it as they went. It was a “startup” in the world of cultural mediation.
RF: Overall, what do you hope readers will take away from this book?
AF: While writing this book, I felt compelled to tell this story because it offers a new lens through which to understand Fascist culture—its contradictions, complexities, and paradoxes. Historiographically, I thought that it could challenge simplified views of fascism as merely autarkic or anti-modern. In fact, Fascist Italy was one of the most active consumers of translated literature at the time, a contradiction that speaks volumes.
This history shows that modernity arrived in Italy through, and often in spite of, fascism’s violence. It reminds us that politics alone does not shape culture; it can also serve as a form of resistance. The relationship between culture and power is still very present today, and the figure of the “foreigner” within a national system (a central theme in my book) remains deeply relevant.
Although my book discusses books and translations, at its core it is about people: authors, agents, translators, and the political and cultural systems that they navigated. Like every cultural action, publication is political. That is why I approach this work through an interdisciplinary lens, connecting the histories of diplomacy, publishing, literature, and cultural production. One of my ongoing challenges, especially within a political science department in Italy, is advocating for publishing history as a means to understand political discourse.
When I was a PhD student, some professors were skeptical, wondering how literature fit into a historian’s training. But I am glad that I pursued it and that the field is now growing. It has been gratifying to see my book, Cacciatori di libri, assigned in university courses on the history of publishing. Scholars like Lanfranchi have opened new directions, like the history of copyright, and I am excited to see early-career researchers taking up these questions and pushing the work further. Right now, we are building a network of scholars focused on literary agents, including Anna Lanfranchi, Cécile Cottenet, and Corinna Norrick-Rühl. This September 18–19, we will be holding an international research workshop called “Literary Agents and the Transatlantic Circulation of Texts: Needs and Opportunities” [Agents littéraires et circulations transatlantiques des textes : Perspectives de recherche] at the Université d’Aix-Marseille to discuss both research and archival challenges in this field.
RF: The amount of collaboration that can come from this is quite impressive and extraordinarily important for this field. What are you branching out into now?
AF: I wrote a forthcoming paper on how the Fascist regime constructed a new national identity, one that was meant to be exclusively Fascist and Italian. I examine the role that translations played in challenging and ultimately undermining this project. Translations carry messages shaped by different cultural and social contexts, and they often disrupted the regime’s carefully crafted narrative. This article, titled “La torbida valanga delle traduzioni,” will be published in a forthcoming edited volume, Editoria, censura e cultura nazionale nel regime fascista all’interno del volume collettaneo (Viella, forthcoming 2025). This volume explores the nature of Italian culture under Fascism, asking what kind of culture it was, how it functioned, and what tensions shaped it during those twenty years.
I am currently working on several projects, one of which builds on my earlier research on censorship and cultural mediation: the history of literature during the Cold War. In Italy, I had access to local sources, but studying in the US was essential. As a global hub of literary culture, the US offered archival depth that I simply could not find elsewhere. Because New York was the world’s publishing capital, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which I visited last spring as a fellow at Columbia’s Italian Academy, holds particularly extensive archives from major publishers and literary agents. It allowed me to examine the other side of transatlantic cultural exchange.
During the Cold War, the role of literary agents and their influence expanded significantly, buiding on networks established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These networks, especially those in the Anglo-American world, help explain the strengthening cultural and political ties between Italy, the US, and the UK during the postwar period.
Literary agents played a key role in shaping a shared Western imaginary—what we now refer to politically as “the West.” This ideological construct emerged alongside the global spread of capitalism, whose cultural center shifted from London to New York. Italy, in large part because of its prominent Communist Party, became a crucial site of cultural contention between East and West. Books, translations, and the agents behind them were instrumental in defining this ideological battle. So, I am particularly interested in how the “battle of books” in Cold War Italy can be understood through the lens of literary agents and their transnational influence.
Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. Her main research focuses on the intersection between Italian studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on climate change and foodways. She also explores how Italy imagines the rapidly changing landscape through speculative fiction and how this correlates in the real world with policymaking and sociocultural adjustments. Her translations have been published or are forthcoming in a wide range of journals and by various publishing houses, such as Asymptote, Snuggly Books, and West Branch, and her research appears in Military Medicine.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Prefecture Cabinet Fund, second deposit, category 044 Publishing Houses, folder 33 (1938), file, Ariete Publishing House, letter from the Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome to the Prefect of Milan (translation ban), June 14, 1938. Reproduced with permission of the State Archives of Milan (ASMi).
