Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia

The Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia was founded in Rome in 1925 by Giovanni Treccani, with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile as editor-in-chief. In addition to the founder, who was also its president, and philosopher Gentile, who was its first scientific director, its members included publisher Calogero Tumminelli as editorial director, the linguist Antonino Pagliaro as editor-in-chief, Gian Alberto Blanc, Pietro Bonfante, Luigi Cadorna, Alberto De Stefani, Gaetano De Sanctis, Luigi Einaudi, Vittorio Grassi, Ettore Marchiafava, Silvio Longhi, Ferdinando Martini, Ugo Ojetti, Francesco Salata, Vittorio Scialoja, Angelo Sraffa, Paolo Thaon di Revel, and Tommaso Tittoni.

The first publication by the Institute was the Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere e Arti (lit. 'Italian Encyclopaedia of Science, Letters, and Arts'), which was completed in 1939, and consisted of 36 volumes. Best known as Enciclopedia Italiana or the Great Encyclopaedia, it is an Italian-language encyclopaedia and is regarded as one of the great encyclopaedias, being international in scope, alongside Encyclopædia Britannica and others.

Since the 1990s, Treccani has played a leading role arts publishing and facsimile editions, reproducing many medieval manuscripts from the notable Italian and European libraries. Alongside these activities, it has gained a consistent presence in digital publishing, publishing e-books, apps, and the Treccani.it portal, which had over 80 million unique users in 2022.

Facsimile reproductions of illuminated manuscripts kept in the most important European libraries contribute to the conservation and diffusion of an immense common artistic and literary heritage. The latest publications are those of the magnificent code preserved in Florence in the Laurentian Library, with the signature Plut. 6.23, an 11th–12th-century Gospel book, accompanied by a systematic illustrative apparatus. The 237 folios contain 285 illustrations. As Tania Velmans defines it in the essay published in the volume accompanying the facsimile (Il Tetravangelo della Laurenziana, Florence, Laur. Plut. 6.23, 2020), it is "an almost unique specimen for the abundance of his illustrations, fidelity to the evangelical texts, the will to reconstruct the evangelical story through the image, in an almost integral way" (p. 36).