Feltrinelli Brand Guidelines: The Milan Publisher’s Bookshops, Begun in Pisa in 1957

From a Milan publishing house to a bookshop in Pisa.

The Feltrinelli bookshops grew out of a publishing house. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli founded Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Milan in the mid-1950s: Italian Wikipedia gives late 1954, while the company dates its own beginnings to 1955 and marked its seventieth anniversary in 2025, Il Giorno reported in February that year. Before that, in 1949, he had set up a library for the study of contemporary history and social movements, which later became the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

The publisher made its name quickly. It published Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in 1957 and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) in 1958, which won the Strega prize, Italy’s main literary award, in 1959, according to Italian Wikipedia. Its paperback series, the Universale Economica, dates from 1949.

The bookshops followed. The first La Feltrinelli bookshop opened in Pisa in 1957, the Florence newspaper La Nazione reported in November 2023, and Italian Wikipedia gives the same year and city. Milan, Genoa, Florence and Rome came next: the culture site Libreriamo listed Genoa in 1959, Florence in 1962 and Rome in 1964 when it reported the closure of the Milan shop on via Manzoni in 2020. That Milan shop had a place in Italian publishing history: when Feltrinelli bought a 10 per cent stake in the Milan publisher Adelphi in July 2024, the company recalled that Adelphi had first been presented to the public at the via Manzoni shop in 1962, Il Libraio reported.

One bookseller shaped the chain for decades: Romano Montroni, who joined Librerie Feltrinelli in 1962 and was its director until 2000, Rai Cultura, the cultural service of Italy’s public broadcaster, wrote in April 2020. He later taught at the Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri, the Italian school for booksellers, and wrote books about the trade.

A red sign in Italian city centres.

Feltrinelli’s shops are easy to spot. When the chain prepared to open in the old centre of Lucca in 2023, La Nazione wrote that the city would soon see a new red sign in its most characteristic streets. Italian Wikipedia styles the chain’s name laFeltrinelli, with a lower-case first letter.

Over the years the chain has split into formats. Italian Wikipedia lists the traditional La Feltrinelli librerie; La Feltrinelli Libri e Musica, where books sit beside records, DVDs and video games; La Feltrinelli Village in shopping centres; La Feltrinelli Express in railway stations and airports; and La Feltrinelli Point, a franchise for small and medium-sized towns. RED, short for “Read, Eat, Dream,” combines a bookshop with a restaurant. The group also took on the music retailer Ricordi Media Stores, of which a Milan shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II remained in 2017, according to the same source; of five international-language bookshops, one in Rome remains.

The chain kept opening shops in the 2020s. In November 2023 La Nazione reported a 380-square-metre shop in the centre of Lucca, without a café, and that the group had just opened shops in Venice and Naples; at that time it counted 120 shops in 58 cities. In February 2025, as the publisher marked seventy years, Il Giorno reported 122 bookshops.

The anniversary also brought a design project. In 2025 the publisher reissued 25 titles from its Universale Economica paperback series as a limited series called UE70, with covers that rework the series’ original graphic design, Il Giorno reported; titles included Doctor Zhivago, Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss and Paolo Rumiz’s È Oriente.

Bookshops and documentation.

Bookshop chains in Europe and Asia tend to present themselves through places before products. Many keep one older or larger shop at the centre of their story, a flagship on a named street that appears in their histories, their photographs and often their anniversaries. In Lisbon, Bertrand’s Chiado shop on Rua Garrett plays that part; in Madrid, Casa del Libro’s building on the Gran Vía does the same. For a design reader, the flagship is where a chain’s colours, signs and lettering are seen at their largest.

Inside the shops, the companies describe spaces for reading and meeting as much as shelves. Chains publish details of rooms for book launches and talks, children’s sections and floors given over to single subjects, and some describe places where visitors can sit with a book. These spaces are part of how a bookseller explains what it is for, and they usually carry the same signs and colours as the shop floor.

Most large chains now run loyalty or members’ programmes and an online shop alongside the physical stores. Membership cards, members’ areas on a website and online marketplaces are described by the companies themselves, and the scale of such programmes is checked in these guides against dated press reports rather than marketing pages. Store and imprint naming is usually plain: many chains carry a founder’s surname, a city, or a simple description of a house of books, and a publishing imprint may sit under the same group as the shops.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings and the publishing groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership often changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

A family group, online and abroad.

The shops and the publishing house sit under one family holding company. In 2005 the family set up EFFE 2005 Gruppo Feltrinelli, which brought together the publisher and the bookshops, along with other businesses, according to Italian Wikipedia. In November 2023 the group’s president was Carlo Feltrinelli, the founder’s son, La Nazione reported. The group’s publishing side has grown as well: it owns a majority of Marsilio and the Società Editrice Milanese, among others, according to Italian Wikipedia, and in July 2023 it launched a new literary imprint, Feltrinelli Gramma, with its first books in 2024, the Corriere della Sera reported.

Online selling took several attempts. A first venture, the online bookshop Zivago.com, launched with a partner in 1999 and closed in 2001, according to Italian Wikipedia; the chain’s own site, lafeltrinelli.it, followed in 2007. In October 2017 Gruppo Feltrinelli and the book distributor Messaggerie Italiane agreed a joint venture that combined lafeltrinelli.it with Messaggerie’s IBS.it and the secondhand and school-book site libraccio.it, the trade paper Giornale della Libreria reported; Feltrinelli was to hold 50.1 per cent. The two groups had already joined forces in book distribution in 2014.

In February 2026 the chain opened the first Feltrinelli bookshop in South America, in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, Il Libraio reported. The shop sits in a restored Art Nouveau building between the city centre and the Ciudad Vieja, near the Teatro Solís, and was set up with three local booksellers as partners, Montevideo Portal reported on 23 February 2026; it stocks more than 50,000 books in Spanish, English and Italian, with a café and an events space upstairs. The Uruguayan public broadcaster’s news site had reported the plan in October 2025.

For a design guide, Feltrinelli shows how a publisher’s name can become a shop sign, with one red mark carrying the same identity from Pisa to Montevideo. Compare Gibert, the Paris bookseller, and Casa del Libro, another southern European chain. For this guide we use a strong red, black and cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Feltrinelli’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.