Marotta & Marotta is a Neapolitan publishing house that boasts more than half a century of history in the field of graphic art and fine publishing.
Around the fifties to say Naples was like saying Giuseppe Marotta, the thin, fearful author of the Naples Gold: Naples and the writer Giuseppe Marotta identified themselves, became synonymous. But to say Marotta, today, twenty years later is to say Alberto Marotta, the publisher. These are not easy operations, these substitutions in person, these “comebacks” are mythical enterprises .
Thus began a 1972 writing by Domenico Rea dedicated to that brilliant publisher who, after working with Vallardi, Garzanti and Ulman, founded his own publishing house in 1959, publishing, first in Italy, “Isabelle” by Gide.
That first book was followed by many others testifying to a spirit that knew how to combine the humanistic taste of great bibliophiles (think of the anastatis of the Starita edition of Leopardi’s works with the corrections and additions of the Poet’s autograph), to the commitment to introduce new authors with the series “The Contemporary Italian Poets” edited and directed by Salvatore Quasimodo.
Alberto Marotta will die in 1978, but the name “Marotta” remains in Naples, as Rea would say “mythical”, not only for the editions, reworked by Marotta & Marotta of important works of the old catalog as “Uses and Costumes of Naples and surroundings” “Of De Bourcard or” The Anthology of Neapolitan Poets“curated by Ettore De Mura, but for a strong innovative commitment within a solid tradition.
In art publishing, Marotta has a forty-year tradition. It includes the famous essay by Salvatore Quasimodo, of 1968, about Giorgio de Chirico, with an autograph work by the artist, and translated in four languages; the “Pulcinella” folder “By Corrado Cagli of 1974; the Cartels of Primo Conti, edited by Giulio Carlo Argan (“Primo Conti “and “Homage to Apollinaire”); two serigraph folders by Maurice Henry (” Joy de vivre “and “Female landscapes” ) of 1971 and 1975.
So, for the graphics, Nini Marotta proposes again “The artist covers by BOLAFFIARTE”, a hundred and more multiples of art, signed and numbered, made by the greatest artists of the ‘900. Among the art catalogs, it should not be forgotten, an important work of artistic rediscovery, by Carmina Benincasa, on the work of the futurist painter Alberto Bragaglia. While, “An Art for the State” by Alessandro Masi, a summary essay on art in the Fascist period, is now a classic.
And again, for art and poetry, Marotta & Marotta presents a series of precious volumes dedicated to the night, which collects works and poems of artists and poets, created according to the classical canons of the “Grand LIvre” and accompanied by original graphics or unique works on wood. The first, “Notte Trasfigurata”, published in two hundred copies, sees the meeting of the lyric of the never forgotten Giuseppe Giovanni Battaglia, with the works of the painter Luigi Granetto, exponent of a post-modern and pre-conceptual Italian taste. The second, “Notte Trasfigurata due”, published in only sixty copies, places the lyrics of Aurelio Pes next to the lithographs of Menendez Rocas.
Beyond its editorial production, Marotta proposes works by other publishing houses, paying particular attention to everything related to Southern Italy and Modern and Contemporary Art.