Alberto Petrucciani’s latest book, Libri e libertà, gives us a chance to reconsider the regional government’s role in the cultural policy of Italian public libraries. Even though former Library Superintendents and other ministerial and central bodies did help to deepen the debate on public libraries, there is no questioning that the Regions and the local administrations in general played a role in promoting library services: starting from the Seventies with the first regional laws on libraries, the regional governments marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Italian libraries, a phase that is still ongoing and finds its legislative foundations in the 1948 Italian Constitution.