Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, September 19 2020 – The Municipality of Milan successfully participated in the MiBACT tender which allocated, as an extraordinary measure to support books and the book publishing chain, 30 million euros to be allocated to libraries open to the public - of the State, of local authorities , cultural centers - to purchase books from bookstores in your metropolitan area.

Also requested by the 12 councilors for culture of the main Italian cities, this announcement is an important intervention to support independent bookshops, precious safeguards of culture and sociality in the Milanese neighbourhoods, key elements of that territorial proximity which is the primary objective in the vision of the city of 15 minutes. Purchases financed by MiBACT will have the effect of enriching the catalogs available to users of civic libraries, who have played a crucial role during the months of this health emergency in terms of support and cultural dialogue with the community.

The request for funding from the Municipality of Milan, in fact, was accepted by the ministerial commission for all 25 libraries of the Milan Library System (the central library, the Bibliobus and 23 local libraries), for the Library of the Museum of Cultures and for the Library of the Natural History Museum and the Civic Aquarium.

The contributions, assigned in proportion to the book holdings of each library, vary from 5 thousand to 10 thousand euros depending on their size, and overall amount to 200.000 euros.

In response to the assignment, the Municipality published a notice on its institutional website to collect expressions of interest from libraries in the metropolitan area in becoming suppliers of municipal libraries. Following verification of the requirements set out in the announcement, 49 bookstores were found to be suitable, the majority of which fall into the category of independent bookstores and cover both the more general areas of publishing, such as fiction and non-fiction, and more specialized areas such as children's fiction, scientific subjects, as well as there are retailers of less traditional books resulting from original projects carried out by young booksellers. These libraries, which were assigned the same shares of the allocation received from MiBACT, were combined with the various libraries, also on the basis of the different types of material handled.