History
The first issue featured the novel The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (as Le sabbie di Marte). The original name of the series was I Romanzi di Urania ("Urania's novels"), to differentiate it from another magazine with the same name (but popularly known as Urania Rivista, "Urania Magazine"), which featured only short stories. The latter, however, lasted only 14 issues, and Romanzi di Urania soon took the simpler name, which still holds today. Short story collections were thenceforth published in the main series, which at its height had a weekly periodicity with a circulation of 160,000 copies a month. Since the very beginning Urania has been indeed the best selling SF magazine of Italy, also introducing to Italian readers some famed authors like Isaac Asimov, Alfred Elton van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and many others. The first editor was Giorgio Monicelli (brother of movie director Mario Monicelli): Monicelli is credited with the invention of the word fantascienza, meaning science-fiction in Italian. From 1964 to 1985 novels and short stories were selected by the renowned Italian writers and intellectuals Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, who also appeared in the magazine with a few short stories written under pseudonyms. Their successor was Gianni Montanari, a well-known SF editor and writer, who worked for the magazine until 1990.
Most of the novels and short stories were from American and British authors (with some French novels in the 1950s). Italian authors appeared uncredited, only under pseudonyms. In recent times Italian SF writers are a more frequent presence. The competition of Premio Urania ("Urania Award") was launched in 1990, open to all previously unpublished Italian novels from famous or unknown authors. The winner is awarded with publication in the magazine. The first winner was Vittorio Catani with his Gli universi di Moras (Urania #1120). In 1994 Urania published the first novel by now-world-famed Valerio Evangelisti, who had won the Premio Urania for that year with Nicholas Eymerich, inquisitore. Other winners include Nicoletta Vallorani and Massimo Mongai.
Read more about this topic: Urania (magazine)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)