Edicola 518/Emergenze Publishing

Edicola 518 is a physical and online bookshop based in Perugia, a small town between Rome and Florence. Since our opening in 2016, we've given a huge contribution to the diffusion of artists' books and independent publishing all over the country and we are unanimously considered the Italian reference point for this niche culture.
In parallel to the bookshop we have founded a publishing house called Emergenze, producing unique pieces that come from long-term field research into art, territories, forgotten stories and anarchy. Our most important English editions are Pasolini Acquatico e Felice (38 never published before pictures of Pasolini bathing at the Tiber river, in the center of Rome), Yes to All (a photographic investigation into the anthropization of the Alps) and Hidden Umbria Nascosta (a collection of written and photographic reportages from our region). Since 2020, we also offer a distribution service to some very small Italian publishers of books and magazines, such as Sali e Tabacchi, Noia, Bellissimo, Terraforma, Skinnerboox and others.

Mattia Micheli and Nicolò Panzeri, Yes to All, Emergenze, 2023 © Mattia Micheli and Nicolò Panzeri

"Yes to All" is a photographic investigation into the anthropization of the Alps, by the Italian photographers Mattia Micheli and Nicolò Panzeri, with an introduction by the Italian writer and alpinist Enrico Camanni.

Many have photographed the Alps in search of naturalism, tradition, wilderness and purity. These concepts belong more to the imaginary mythology of the mountains than to the current anthropological dimension, which is full of contradictions and habits that look uncannily like those of the rest of the world.

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AAVV, Hidden Umbria Nascosta, Emergenze, 2023 © AAVV

"Hidden Umbria Nascosta" is more a philosophical guide than a tourist handbook, urging mindfulness over consumption, patience over purchases. From the church in the tree to the painted house, the imaginary republic to the rock bar, and mummified bodies to utopian architecture, the twelve articles we’ve brought together here create a rough yet authentic sketch of a region where even the borders are uncertain.

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Toti Scialoja, Gabriella Drudi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini Acquatico e Felice / Pasolini by the Water Contented, Emergenze / Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria, 2022 © Toti Scialoja, Gabriella Drudi, Pier Paolo Pasolini

"Pasolini by the water contented" is a man in a bathing costume, proclaiming his affinity with the body of water that starred in many of his masterpieces and, indeed, in the story of his own life: the river Tiber. That quintessentially urban, Roman Tiber of the 1950s, with its beaches, its bathing clubs, its rowboats and springboards; its swimmers, fishermen, fish, and infinite other mysteries. A time when the land simply rolled gently from the city into the water to re-emerge on the other side, with no physical barriers to mark the river out as separate from everyday life.

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