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The profile · researched 15 October 2026
Eighty authors, one hall, a sold-out Saturday: how BukRomance built Italy's romance fair
BukRomance is the Italian festival of romance fiction, run out of a writers' agency in Rome since 2021. Its sixth edition fills the Salone delle Fontane on 7 November 2026 with more than eighty authors, and the tickets have already gone.
An agency sideline that turned into a fair
BukRomance was not founded by a publisher or a bookshop. It came out of TraLeRighe Agency, a social-media operation run by Emilio Brancadoro that groups together more than 9,000 writers, with Roberta Luprano handling organisation and communications. The first edition was trailed in July 2021 under the tag BukRomance21, pitched at genre readers rather than the general book-fair audience.
The second edition, in October 2022, shows how improvised the early model was. Rather than a single day in a hall, it ran across five weekends — 1-2, 8-9, 15-16, 22-23 and 29-30 October — inside the exhibition areas of the AURA shopping centre on Viale di Valle Aurelia in Rome, on the theory that a mall would deliver footfall a literary festival could not. The programme mixed presentations and signings with seminars and debates alongside literary agencies, and the international author Carmen Weiz was brought in as guest of honour.
That edition also carried an ambition the festival has kept: film and television production companies were invited to look over titles for adaptation, and a contest was built around the manuscript judged closest to screen potential. The pitch was never only reader-facing. It was a trade floor for a genre the Italian industry had been slow to treat as one.
Cinecittà World, and who actually comes
The move that changed the event's scale was to Cinecittà World, the film-themed park at Castel Romano on the southern edge of Rome. The fourth edition ran there on 16 November 2024. Luprano described it at the time as a festival for dreamers, where readers — mostly teenagers who devour romance books — meet their authors in an explosion of happiness, love and tears. That is an unusually accurate piece of self-description: the floor is loud, and people cry at the signing tables.
Press coverage of that edition set it against reading figures that explain the demand. Among Italians aged 15 to 17, 82 per cent read regularly; among 18 to 24-year-olds, 78 per cent. The audience is young, overwhelmingly female, and recruited through TikTok and Wattpad, where authors build a following before a traditional house picks them up. BukRomance sells to the end of that pipeline.
The festival returned to Cinecittà World on 15 November 2025, by then listing more than a hundred exhibitors among publishers, authors and professionals, and tying its programming to the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25 November. The park setting also produced a commercial hybrid rare for a book event: visitors could buy a park ticket or a park-and-hotel package, with a bukromance coupon code applied to both.
What is on the floor
The exhibitor mix is the substance of the thing. Major Italian groups take stands — Mondadori, Sperling & Kupfer, HarperCollins, DeAgostini and Adriano Salani Editore among them — and so do the small and independent houses that carry most of the genre's volume: Panda Edizioni, Ruby Ink Edizioni, Triskell Edizioni, Altre voci Edizioni, Eclipsi Lab and Self-Publishing Italia. Self-published authors exhibit in their own right rather than as guests of someone else's stand, which is the part most general book fairs still get wrong.
From 2025 the festival added a dedicated Wattpad area, billed as the first space of its kind at an Italian event, for writers who built their readerships on the platform. A separate dark romance area gives the genre's harder end its own zone instead of folding it into the general floor. Both are organisational admissions that romance is not one audience but several, with different reading habits and different queues.
The result is a layout closer to a comics convention than a literary festival. Readers move between stands on a plan, collecting signatures and meeting authors they have followed online for years, with presentations and discussion sessions running alongside rather than from a single main stage.
Padova, and the first move out of Rome
On 11 April 2026 BukRomance left the capital for the first time, taking Pavilion 11 at the Fiera di Padova. The north-east date drew publishers including Sperling, Rizzoli, Triskell, Salani and Mondadori alongside a long list of self-published authors — Adriana Moccia, Alessia Balistri, Carola Cestari, Catherine BC and Ellis W. Darkhel among them. Land Editore sent five of its writers: Carola Cestari, Luisa Golo, Jennifer P., Cristiana Rosada and Bettina Battistella. The venue sits about 500 metres from Padova station, roughly ten minutes from the Padova Ovest motorway exit.
A reader's piece published on 6 April 2026, days before the doors opened, is the clearest account of how the audience approaches these dates: lists, programmes, mental films, a timetable built to reach several authors in one day, and a joke about finally being able to argue face to face with the writers responsible for what their characters went through. Reports from the day described a young, colourful crowd.
It worked well enough that the return is already booked. Padova is back in the same pavilion on 10 April 2027, with tickets on general sale.
Where it stands in October 2026
The sixth edition lands on 7 November 2026 at the Salone delle Fontane in the EUR district of Rome, open 10.30 to 18.30 and a short walk from the EUR-Palasport stop on Metro line B. It is the most central venue the festival has used, and the line-up is the largest: more than eighty romance authors listed, a dark romance area with twenty-one of them, and a Wattpad area with thirteen platform creators.
The festival's own page for the date now carries two words that settle the question of demand — tickets sold out, with none available at the door on the day. Two dates sit on sale across the operation as of mid-October 2026: Rome in November and Padova the following April.
What BukRomance still lacks is critical weight. The record of five years of editions sits in publisher announcements, reader blogs, local listings and the organisers' own pages rather than on national arts desks, and there is no independent attendance audit beyond the exhibitor counts the festival publishes itself. For a genre whose readers were being told a decade ago that they were not really reading, a hall in EUR selling out before the doors open is the more useful measure.
The show, now
A BukRomance date is a single day on one floor, not a staged show: the Rome edition on 7 November 2026 runs 10.30 to 18.30 at the Salone delle Fontane in EUR, a few minutes from the EUR-Palasport metro stop. There is no support act and no headline set — the format is publisher and author stands, signing queues and discussion sessions running in parallel, with the floor zoned so the harder end of the genre and the platform writers each have their own area: twenty-one authors in the dark romance section and thirteen Wattpad creators, inside a line-up of more than eighty authors. Big houses (Mondadori, Sperling & Kupfer, HarperCollins, Salani) share the hall with independents such as Panda, Ruby Ink, Triskell and Self-Publishing Italia, and with self-published authors exhibiting on their own account. Readers arrive with timed plans to reach specific stands; accounts of the Padova day on 11 April 2026 describe a young, mostly female crowd and long signing lines, and organisers have called the atmosphere an explosion of happiness, love and tears. Rome tickets are listed as sold out with none sold on the day; Padova on 10 April 2027 is on general sale.
Researched from bukromance.com · bukromance.com · leggeretutti.eu · cinecittaworld.it · buonenotizie.it · landeditore.it · alteregouniversus.com · romancenonstop.blogspot.com