Giuseppe Bortolazzi and Norma Fiorio, husband and wife, decided in 1953 to set up their own printing business in San Giovanni Lupatoto, in a small town south of Verona. They set up Tipografia La Commerciale.

In 1954, the family moved to a new home and also relocated the printing business which had already expanded substantially. This saw the onset of book and catalogue printing, be it only text or with black and white reproductions.

In 1971, Fabio – the elder son – finished high School and then took over the reins of the business and defined its definitive vocation for printing books with text and illustrations.

Hot typesetting was then flanked by one of the first photo-typesetting systems delivered in Europe; typographic printing, moreover, was gradually replaced by offset printing, while the zinc “clichés” of the first publications were replaced by single, two and four-colour photolithography plant, that still today are the basis for modern production.

In 1980, new company configuration heralded further development through to the new millennium. The second generation and a vocation for quality, together with a special focus on innovation, enabled the group to consolidate its constantly expanding traditions within the scope of the international industrial scenario. The hallmark of all this emerged in the printing of photographic books by artists such as Henri Cartier Bresson, Andy Warhol, Jacques Lowe and Wim Wenders.

Today, the Bortolazzi family is in the hands of the third generation: grouped by now a solid industrial reality on a national and international scale, with branches in Great Britain and the United States.