Italian publisher Rosellina Archinto, founder of Emme Edizioni and Babalibri, dies at 93

Pioneer of modern picture books

Rosellina Archinto, founder of Emme Edizioni and Babalibri, died on 21 August 2026 at the age of 93 at her home in Santa Margherita Ligure. Born Rosellina Marconi in Genoa on 29 June 1933, she transformed the Italian publishing landscape for children during the second half of the twentieth century. Through her publishing houses, she introduced Italian readers to international illustrators such as Maurice Sendak, Leo Lionni, Tomi Ungerer, Eric Carle, and Guillermo Mordillo. Simultaneously, she exported the work of Italian illustrators including Bruno Munari, Emanuele Luzzati, Flavio Costantini, and Enzo and Iela Mari to foreign markets across France, Germany, and Japan. Her debut catalog launched in 1966 with two titles that became classics of European children's literature, Lionni's Piccolo blu e piccolo giallo alongside Iela Mari's Il palloncino rosso.

Education and the creation of Emme Edizioni

The daughter of Mario Marconi, an engineer who served as general manager of Ansaldo, Archinto initially studied economics and commerce at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where she discussed her thesis on the labor market with Beniamino Andreatta. After deciding against a career in economics, she moved to the United States to attend Columbia University in New York for two years. There, she studied psychopedagogy and encountered contemporary illustrated books that rejected didactic moralizing in favor of visual experimentation. She returned to Italy in 1963 and established Emme Edizioni in 1966 with guidance from publishers Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and Giovanni Enriques. Operating initially out of her living room with graphic designer Salvatore Gregorietti, she set out to sweep aside outdated post-fascist conventions in Italian juvenile literature.

Away with all this old rubbish!

Emme Edizioni broadened its output beyond picture books to include psychopedagogy series by Jean Piaget, Françoise Dolto, and Arno Stern, with introductions written by Natalia Ginzburg.

Shift to epistolary works and cultural journals

In 1985, following the death of her former husband, Count Alberico Archinto Rocca Saporiti, with whom she had five children, Archinto sold Emme Edizioni to pursue new publishing formats. That same year, she established Rosellina Archinto Editore, focusing on correspondence collections, biographies, and intellectual essays. The imprint published epistolary volumes from figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Eugenio Montale. Archinto explained her motivation for this focus on personal letters.

I like books with lived experience inside them.

In 1988, she launched the cultural journal Leggere, which published 90 issues over a ten-year span and included essays by writers such as Andrea Zanzotto, Guido Ceronetti, and Jean Starobinski.

Later years and family succession

Archinto expanded her publishing work again in 1999 by co-founding Babalibri with her daughter Francesca Archinto, keeping classics of illustrated literature accessible to younger generations. In her private life, following the dissolution of her twelve-year marriage to Archinto, she spent four decades in a partnership with industrialist Leopoldo Pirelli until his death in 2007. After selling a majority stake in her namesake publishing house in 2003, she reacquired full ownership of all shares in 2015 prior to the corporate merger between RCS and Mondadori. Her career concluded with decades of influence across children's literature, art illustration, and literary non-fiction.