In 1940 Libreria Malavasi was founded by Paride Malavasi, in Milan, and it's now one of the oldest antiquarian bookshop of the town.
Paride Malavasi died in 1975, but the bookshop continued its activity, with his children, Maurizio, Sandra and Sergio: the three brothers and sister created a new site in 1995, Maremagnum.com
The name of the site seems rather odd: someone called it Malemagnum (the great evil), someone Maramagnum (a wordplay) and someone Mare Nostrum (the Mediterranean sea).
As a matter of fact this name has an historical origin.
At the end of the XVIIth century, two brothers, Francesco and Alessandro Marucelli, founded the Biblioteca Marucelliana
, a public library still existing in Florence, and tried to realize a universal bibliography, called Mare Magnum: the work consisted of 111 in-folio volumes, which unfortunately were never published.
The name Mare Magnum remained in the Italian language, as an example of a caotic work, big like the sea, while Mare Magnum wanted to be a Mare
(an ocean) of bibliographical information, compiled to help scientist and scholars from all over the word.
It's in the same spirit as the Marucelli brothers, that the Libreria Malavasi wanted to offer a site cataloguing all books from all over the world, starting from incunabula up to now.
We hope to have, at least partially, fulfilled the initial goal trying to offer new services to all readers in the world and we will keep on doing this.
Sergio Malavasi - Maremagnum