Bookstore Guide: Open Door Bookshop, Rome

Where? Rome, Italy

Visited: February, 2010

One of the first stops on our Rome trip was precisely this jewel of a bookstore, tucked away in the lively and colorful neighborhood of Trastevere. Just walking about this neighborhood is an experience, while visiting the bookstore is just an icing on the cake. Open Door Bookshop is unique in the sense that it is the only purely old school second hand English language bookstore in the whole city of Rome - at least the only one that we could find either online or personally and we did search thoroughly. Moreover, it has been contributing to the Roman literary community for a very long time for it was opened some twenty years ago.

Once you enter Open Door you feel as if time has stopped and nothing can prevent you from browsing its stock for hours. And the selection is excellent as well - unlike some of the second hand bookstores we've seen - those seemingly carrying thousands of books while the stock, in fact, consists mostly of mediocre titles of action, mystery and thriller genres.

Open Door Bookshop is home to thousands of used books - a very decent selection of guidebooks (which were at a discount price of 3EUR at the time of our visit), a whole wall dedicated to books on art, philosophy, politics and other humanistic sciences and a whole other wall filled with a surprisingly rich and tasty selection of fiction works. In front of the store there are books for as low as 1EUR and even free ones (but those are usually the ones which no one wants - perhaps you'll want to give them a home).

The people at Open Door pride themselves at not specializing in anything, which has resulted in an ecclectic selection of titles on offer gathered on their shelves through the years. The other room of the bookstore shelves cookbooks and books in other languages such as Italian, German, French and Spanish. You can check out their catalog or order a book and, moreover, if you have books to sell, Open Door will probably buy them. Don't miss the nostalgic collection of old Penguin paperback editions, which will surely bring many memories. Also, be sure to check out the "various" section where things such as maps and old photographs can be found.