Emilio Macchia is a graphic designer and art director of eee studio; he trained at ISIA Urbino and developed a research path at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He is artistic director of Fahrenheit39 Art
Book Fair and the Photo Observatory. He teaches at various Italian universities and holds workshops and conferences in Italy and abroad.
BEAUTIFUL ITALIAN BOOKS
24.10
Talk by Federica Ricci, Emilio Macchia16:30
ADI Design Museum
The talk presents Beautiful Italian Books as a cultural project still under construction — from its beginnings and its development inside a community that supports its structure and orients its prospects.
It moves through the project’s constitutive elements — the jury, the exhibition, the catalogue — placing Beautiful Italian Books in dialogue with historic partner awards: devices through which to read different approaches to selecting, judging and presenting contemporary publishing, and the design and material conditions behind it.
The talk then turns to the international circuit Best Book Design from All Over the World, which brings together 34 countries already active in national book-design awards, and which Italy now joins. In the Italian context, where the specifics of cultural policy bear directly on the quality of publishing, international comparison becomes a necessary space of reading and verification: crossing practices, skills, production systems and economic models, and reading the book as the outcome of complex material and design conditions.
BEST BOOK DESIGN FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD
from 22.10 to 8.11
Exhibition curated by Beautiful Italian Books10:30 – 19:45
ADI Design Museum
The selection of Best Book Design from All Over the World arrives in Italy as part of the International Graphic Biennial at ADI Design Museum. The exhibition makes visible an international geography of publishing production where the book emerges as the result of a complex chain that contributes to the construction of a design and public object.
The exhibition takes on the character of an inaugural moment for the Italian context. Starting thisyear, Italy will join this international network of exchange and recognition for the first time: in fact, Beautiful Italian Books was born in 2026, which collects and curates a
selection of editorial projects that will participate for the first time in Best Book Design from All Over the World in Leipzig.
The exhibition therefore opens a new space of observation and comparison, reading the book in its final, complete form — where content and form support each other, and where conception, editorial project, design, printing and binding build a single entity through the collaboration of different skills and professions.
The exhibition will be open until 8.11.2026 during the opening hours of ADI Design Museum.
