Milano — Milan

Milan, the capital of Italian publishing

Most of Italy's large publishing houses — and many of its small literary ones — are based in Milan, which has been the center of the Italian book trade since the nineteenth century. The city's book culture is concentrated in a few neighborhoods, and the old quarter of Brera, with its art academy and library, still has bookshops and publishers' offices in buildings like the one in this scene. In Italian publishing, the editor in the English sense — the person who works on a book with its author — is often called l'editor, borrowed from English, while l'editore means the publisher, the company or its owner. The difference trips up many learners. A long partnership between an author and one editor, like Ada's forty years with Giorgio, is not unusual in Italy, and editors are often the people translators turn to first when a question about the text can't be answered from the page. Dislocation — «La prova, l'abbiamo letta» — is one of the most characteristic features of spoken Italian, and one of the hardest for English speakers to stop translating literally. In writing it can look informal, but in speech it is everywhere, from the market to the boardroom. It is also a translation problem: rendered word for word into English, it sounds odd; rendered with normal English word order, it loses the speaker's voice.