The Duomo team: (l. to r.) Maurizio Munaretti, Luigi Spagnol, Valerie Miles, Stefano Mauri, and Gianluca Mazzitelli.

In Italian, duomo means a citizen’s home or a gathering place, a concept its multinational creators (hailing from the United States, Italy, and Spain) thought would go well with its intended high-caliber list of new and established international writers. It’s also the name of a gothic cathedral in Milan, the city where Duomo’s Italian parent company, GeMS (Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol), has its headquarters. The Italian company earned €150 million (roughly $203 million) in revenue last year and, though there’s strong financial backing for Duomo, it’s starting small with an eye on quality. Duomo’s Barcelona office will be staffed by Miles, editor Ángels Balaguer, and financial managing director Maurizio Munaretti.

With only a two-hour plane ride from Barcelona to Milan, there’s always been a synergy between the two cosmopolitan cities: Barcelona is considered Spain’s publishing hub, as is Milan for Italy.

“We are very interested in the Spanish market. It has two large publishing groups and many medium-sized quality publishers, in a revitalized country that is looking towards the future, whose readers’ tastes are quite similar to those of the Italians; in the past few years, also, Spain has produced some of the most important international best-sellers,” said GeMS president and CEO Stefano Mauri. “But above all, according to our philosophy, we believe that we will be able to build a company centered on people who can create a new publishing project—people who value our style and our ability in founding independent editorial 'workshops.’”

Italy’s GeMS was formed in 2005 when the Mauri and Spagnol families united to control nine publishing houses: Corbaccio, Garzanti Libri, Guanda, Longanesi, Nord, Ponte alle Grazie, Salani, TEA, and Vallardi. They just recently acquired the publisher Chiarelettere, and now the Barcelona-based Duomo will make the total eleven.

For Miles, a U.S. native who has worked for 15 years in Spain as an editor for Planeta and Santillana and as the current co-editor of Granta Español, this is the perfect opportunity to flex her literary muscles. “I am a bit of a rara avis in being an American who has somehow found her way into publishing in Spain, and though it has perhaps been more of a challenge for me (due to the double jeopardy: foreigner and a woman) it has also become a strength in many ways,” said Miles. “I have a very privileged position, a sort of bird’s-eye view that allows me to facilitate exchange.”

Duomo Ediciones will be launched at Frankfurt 2008 and aims to release its first titles in May 2009. The publishing house also will seek distribution of its titles in the United States. Aiming at marrying traditional publishing with new technologies and content management, Duomo’s policy is clear-cut: to publish authors and not just books. “We are allying ourselves with other cultural projects internationally, like Granta and the New York Review of Books, to exchange what is going on in the Spanish language with what is going on in other languages,” added Miles. Duomo is small enough to be agile. Backed by an independent family-owned company with no ties within Spain’s tangled web of high-ranking media battles and political intrigue, Duomo’s new team may just be settling into a win-win situation.