Foà, Bazlen and then Calasso and the others: Anna Ferrando on the trail of the first Adelphi

“Culture is a catacomb, it is a private tunnel, a realm of slow and wonderful moles that meet in blindness. Darkness and silence hover in their holes, but in the meantime they dig”. This is how Goffredo Parise described Adelphi’s activity in 1964 after having touched the first published books, “pure ideas” as Luciano Foà called them. The official birth of the publishing house dates back to 1962, but the idea of ​​a place to pay attention to authors and works that badly matched the Italian cultural (and commercial) climate of the time has more distant origins, in the thirties, when the two adelphoi, the brothers protagonists of the original partnership, Luciano Foà and Bobi Bazlen, began, despite the fascist censorship, to sound out the most hidden places of culture.