Rizzoli

Rizzoli
Name	Rizzoli
Founded	1927
Founder	Angelo Rizzoli
Country	Italy
Headquarters	Milan
Publications	Books, Magazines
Topics	Art, Architecture, Fashion, Design, Medicine

Rizzoli is an Italian publishing house established in 1927 that developed into a multinational group active in book publishing, magazine production, retail bookstores, and medical research. Founded by Angelo Rizzoli in Milan, it expanded through acquisitions, international imprints, and diversification into illustrated art books, fashion monographs, architecture surveys, and specialist medical texts. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the company intersected with major cultural institutions, global bookstores, art historians, and the orthopedic medical community.

History

The company was founded by Angelo Rizzoli during the interwar period and grew alongside publishing contemporaries such as Mondadori, Feltrinelli, Einaudi, Adelphi Edizioni, and Garzanti in Italy. In the postwar era Rizzoli engaged editors and authors associated with Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Giorgio Bassani, and the literary circles around Gruppo 63, while competing with European houses like Gallimard, Faber and Faber, Knopf, and Seuil. Rizzoli expanded into magazine publishing, interacting with titles tied to the fashion houses Giorgio Armani and Prada for photographic collaborations, and worked with photographers linked to Vogue and Vanity Fair. Corporate shifts included mergers and sales that involved entities such as Bertelsmann, Mondadori Group, Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera Media Group, and later conglomerates like Arnoldo Mondadori Editore and international partners comparable to HarperCollins and Penguin Random House.

Rizzoli Publications

Rizzoli became noted for illustrated monographs on figures including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, and Andy Warhol, as well as architectural surveys addressing work by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid, and Renzo Piano. In fashion and design Rizzoli published studies of Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Gianni Versace, Karl Lagerfeld, and Tom Ford. Its art-historical lists engaged curators from institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Museo del Prado, Louvre, and Guggenheim Museum. Rizzoli’s illustrated books often accompanied exhibitions at venues like Biennale di Venezia, Museum of Modern Art, Royal Academy of Arts, and Centre Pompidou. In nonfiction and reference, it issued titles covering figures in film and music connected to Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Ennio Morricone, Luciano Pavarotti, and Mina.

Rizzoli Bookstores and Retail Operations

Rizzoli operated flagship retail locations and international imprints, comparable in profile to Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Shakespeare and Company, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, and Daunt Books. Notable stores appeared in major cultural centers such as Milan, New York City, London, Paris, and Tokyo, hosting events with authors like Paulo Coelho, Orhan Pamuk, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood. The retail arms collaborated with cultural institutions including New York Public Library, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and museums like Whitney Museum of American Art for catalog sales and author lectures.

Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute

Separate from its publishing activities, the name is associated with a biomedical institution founded from the Rizzoli legacy: an orthopedic research and clinical center recognized alongside institutions such as Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, and university hospitals like University of Bologna. The institute developed pioneering work in orthopedics, collaborating with researchers from Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Karolinska Institutet, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge, and publishing findings in journals such as The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and Nature Medicine.

Notable Works and Authors

Rizzoli’s catalog includes authoritative monographs and exhibition catalogues by and about creators and scholars such as Pietro Bellori, Giorgio Vasari, Hans Holbein, Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Giovanni Bellini, Caravaggio, Titian, and modern critics and curators like Robert Hughes, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Nicholas Serota. It published design retrospectives on studios and firms including Baccarat, Alessi, Kartell, Fendi Casa, and architectural portfolios by Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster. In applied sciences it issued medical and surgical texts by authors affiliated with Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and academic presses such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Cultural Impact and Media Adaptations

Rizzoli-published works have served as source material and exhibition companions for documentaries and films about figures like Lucian Freud, Pina Bausch, Federico Fellini, and Georgia O'Keeffe, with adaptations and collaborations involving production companies and broadcasters such as BBC, RAI, PBS, Netflix, and HBO. Its catalogs and art books frequently appear in film and television prop lists in productions by directors including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, and Ridley Scott, and have been cited in academic symposia hosted by Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton University, Sciences Po, and Università degli Studi di Milano.

Corporate Structure and Ownership

Over time the company’s ownership evolved through transactions typical of major European publishers, involving corporate actors like Fininvest, Mediobanca, Bertelsmann, Mondadori, and international investment firms comparable to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital. Its governance involved boards with executives and cultural managers connected to institutions such as Confindustria, Associazione Italiana Editori, and partnerships with global distributors like Ingram Content Group and Hachette Livre.

Category:Publishing companies of Italy