Italy's school-book drive opens with 4,135 shops and a first presidential patronage

Italy's annual drive to put books in schools opened on November 7 with more shops, and with nurseries included nationwide for the first time. Il Sole 24 Ore reported on November 5, 2026, that the eleventh edition of #ioleggoperché, run by the Italian Publishers' Association, runs through November 15. A reader can buy a book at one of 4,135 participating bookshops and donate it to one of 30,610 schools or, new this year on a national scale, one of 4,004 registered nurseries. The paper said the campaign reaches more than 4.4 million children and young people through more than 110,000 pairings of schools and shops.

For the first time the drive is under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic. Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of the publishers' association, said the recognition follows ten years of work and that the aim is to get books to places that have had fewer of them. After the public donations, publishers are making 100,000 volumes available to schools in Calabria, Sardinia, and Molise that applied, regions the project says have benefited less so far. Those publisher copies are allocated. The books bought by readers this week are not yet a finished total.

In Milan, the week includes a drawing workshop on November 7 at the Mondadori bookstore on Corso Buenos Aires. The news is the scale of the shops, schools, and nurseries signed up, and the patronage. It is not a count of books already handed over in 2026.