Einaudi published Italy's finest on borrowed money — the court said insolvent in 1983

Giulio Einaudi Editore was founded in Turin on 15 November 1933 by the twenty-one-year-old Giulio Einaudi and his schoolmates of the Liceo d'Azeglio, and became the house of Pavese and Calvino, of Natalia Ginzburg and Primo Levi, of Bobbio and Sciascia — the ostrich emblem, the motto Spiritus durissima coquit: the spirit digests the hardest things. The prestige was real, and so was the credit it ran on: already in 1954 the firm carried liabilities of 1,750 million lire, and in 1957 shareholders were told its debts reached 1.3 billion.

The end came through the grandi opere — multi-volume works of high scholarship, built on financial policies the house was never equipped for. The series aggravated the already heavy load of debt and bank rates until, in the changed context of the early 1980s, the old policy of calculated risk stopped working and what Treccani calls a true financial collapse arrived — one that reached the family's assets. The year 1983 was the house's fiftieth, the year of its historical catalogue, and the year of the crisis: on 29 December the tribunal of Turin declared Giulio Einaudi Editore insolvent.

On 25 January 1984 the industry minister's decree placed the house in amministrazione straordinaria, the state procedure for large firms in crisis; the extraordinary commissioner was Giuseppe Rossotto, with successors in 1997 and 2003 — three commissioners across two decades. For the first time since the founding, Giulio Einaudi was no longer at the head of his house; he passed to external consultant and returned as president in 1988. From 1986 ran a long series of negotiations — Electa acquired the house in 1989, Elemond in 1991, and at the end of 1994 the Mondadori group took it over.

The story survives in two tellings by the people who lived it. The founder's own memoir, Frammenti di memoria, runs from the birth of the Struzzo to the crisis of the eighties; and thirty years on, two of his editors gathered Una stanza all'Einaudi — a room at Einaudi's — to record what the house had been. Its frame is the verdict: the 1983 crisis led the house to amministrazione straordinaria and so, in fact, to the failure of its grandiose political-cultural project. The cost had no number in lire; it was the independence of Italy's great publisher.