A Story Shaped by Time, Held by Books, Still Open to Be Written

The year 2025, now drawing to a close, has marked a decisive moment for D’ORO Collection, bearing with it an anniversary of remarkable significance: twenty-five years of activity. This milestone opens like a threshold from which to recognise the path travelled so far and to glimpse the territories that lie ahead. Guiding this journey, as ever, are books — custodians of vision, discreet narrators capable of opening passages through time and revealing ever-new perspectives and possibilities.

This meaningful year has seen the emergence of Unfolded Ways. Rome as Never Read Before, a volume born from creative impetus and meticulous artistic research, moving between traditions and languages and bringing different expressive worlds into relation. The volume gathers the works inspired by the Eternal City created by twenty-five internationally renowned artists, in dialogue with photographs portraying the city’s contemporary face and literary texts selected across centuries and cultures. Accompanying this constellation is the Red Theatre, the imaginary landscape created by the Squary Eyes collective, in which the city becomes the scenography of a modern fable.

Unveiled for the first time during the celebratory evening marking D’ORO Collection’s twenty-fifth anniversary, held at its historic headquarters at Villa Dino along the Appia Antica, Unfolded Ways was later welcomed by the Embassy of Italy in Riyadh, where its two most precious art editions were presented: the Collectible Masterpiece — featuring D’ORO Collection’s iconic hand-repoussé copper cover gilded in 24-carat gold — and the Monumental Edition, a large-scale work conceived as an architecture to be leafed through. The latter remained on display within the Embassy until November, bearing witness to the role of the book as a cultural ambassador and a symbol of Italian excellence.

In this spirit, 2025 has reaffirmed the Publishing House’s international presence within the art world. D’ORO Collection was among the protagonists of MAZE Design Basel and of the inauguration of the Kiani Concept Art Gallery in Istanbul — new milestones joining a path cultivated over time and enriched by collaborations with prominent institutions and exhibition spaces such as the Marian Goodman Gallery, the B3 Biennale in Frankfurt, the Kursalon Museum in Vienna and Palazzo Donà dalle Rose in Venice.

Over twenty-five years, D’ORO Collection’s vocation to inhabit places where beauty can be experienced has also led the Publishing House to renew its presence in the world of fashion. In 2023, D’ORO Collection released The State of Fashion in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2023, presented during Paris Fashion Week at the Hôtel d’Évreux on Place Vendôme. This year, on the occasion of the third edition of Riyadh Fashion Week — now the leading fashion event in the Middle East — D’ORO Collection presented VISION, the latest chapter of the official magazine of the Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia, once again articulating the codes of high-end publishing in the service of fashion.

During this year, the dialogue with the Gulf countries has grown through editorial projects and cultural initiatives expressed in prestigious contexts — from Galeries Lafayette Doha to ArtDom Riyadh, and the many activities developed in collaboration with institutions and cultural organisations. The bespoke projects continues as well, offering the opportunity to give shape to volumes conceived as unique works. A culture without limits, steadily expanding into new spaces and towards new interlocutors.

Each project undertaken by D’ORO Collection arises from a profound cultural vision and from time cultivated with care — time necessary to give form to works destined to endure. Such is the case of The Golden Waves, unveiled this year after seven years of research and development: a volume that recounts the primordial power of the sea through the work of the world’s greatest wave photographers, in an encounter between science, image and material.

For twenty-five years, from the Appia Antica — the millenary road that once connected Rome with the world — the books of D’ORO Collection have continued to trace routes: pages that open like maps, works carrying with them the memory of their origin and projecting themselves towards ever-new geographies, traversing arts, languages, materials and cultures. Twenty-five years reveal a continuity of vision rooted in the Italian tradition of fine bookbinding and renewed with every project, every encounter, every volume that takes shape. The future is already in motion, and the year ahead stands as its next threshold.