Edizioni della Normale
The Scuola Normale has combined publishing along with its teaching and research activities from very early on. The Annali della Classe di Scienze was first published in 1871, while the Annali della Classe di Lettere was first published in 1873. Both of these yearbooks have been important in spreading the name and prestige of the Scuola Normale among Italian and foreign scholars alike.
But the publishing activity of the Normale is not limited to these two publications, however important they are. Over the last century there have been numerous publications and series; among which one of the most important and original was Testi umanistici inediti o rari by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Alessandro Perosa, published in the 1930s when Giovanni Gentile was President of the Normale.
The Testi umanistici inediti o rari were the beginning of a wide-ranging publishing effort in which contributions have arrived from both the Faculties of Arts and Sciences, as well as from the Research Centres and Laboratories which have developed over the years at the Normale thanks to the efforts of professors.
The beginning of a new century seemed the right time for an overall review of the publishing activities of the Normale for a number of reasons. Technological developments have changed publishing radically, paper and online publishing are increasingly co-connected and distribution channels and means have opened up which permit even small publishing houses to penetrate areas closed to them in the past.
All of these factors encouraged the Normale to review its publishing activities and create a new and modern Publishing centre, with updated series and graphics. Publishing is carried out together with external scholars and the reading public, always learned, has been widened thanks to newer, updated titles.
The Edizioni della Normale, in the centre founded in 2003, represent the scholarly activity of the two Faculties of Arts and Sciences, following the innovation outlined above and intervening actively in academic and institutional subjects currently under debate, from university reform to schools of excellence and the problems of research in Italy.
In short, the publishing activities at the Normale aim at continuing publication of the traditional lines of research while undertaking comment upon themes which are important to scholarship in the 21 st century.
These activities will be carried out both through traditional paper-based publishing and taking advantage of the synergies which paper and online publishing can develop, both by republishing online material which has already been published on paper and by planning new, online publishing efforts.
In this way the publishing effort at the Normale plans to take advantage of the many opportunities which online publishing offers while establishing new relationships between online and paper publishing.
