It was in 1898 when Augusto Foà founded Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (Ali) in Turin.

Foà was aged just 21 and had a great passion for books: he wrote short stories, published studies on German literature and worked as a translator for UTET.

It was this knowledge of the publishing world, combined with a sizeable degree of intuition, that prompted him to follow innovations in the English-speaking world where the role of the literary agent had started to appear at the very end of the 19th century.

The first agency of its kind (and for a long time the only one) in Italy, Ali dealt with foreign agents and publishers from whom it acquired rights, in particular, for adventure stories which were published, as was customary at that time, as newspaper supplements. The first clients were local newspapers but, in the following years, the agency worked with much more widely-circulated newspapers: "Illustrazione del Popolo", "Tribuna illustrata", "Il Secolo", "Film", "il Giornale d'Italia", "Cerchio Verde", "La Domenica del Corriere" ... and even "Corriere della Sera", with its magazine "Romanzo Mensile", a favourite of Foà.

The collection of writers also extended to include other literary genres: from thrillers to science fiction, from comic literature to essays with authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse and the Nobel prize winner Rudyard Kipling.

In the meantime, Ali changed headquarters several times. After moving to Milan at the start of the 20th century, it returned to Turin in 1923 but then moved back to Milan where it has remained ever since, firstly at Via Quintino Sella 2 and then, from 1933, at Corso del Littorio 3 (now Corso Matteotti) where the agency, which was still an extremely small business, occupied premises at the tailor's shop of Foà's brother-in-law, Sante Agnelli.

Despite the limited surroundings, however, Foà created a vast network of correspondents, thanks notably to his frequent trips abroad. In particular, he established contacts in London with Heat&Company, Robert Sommerville and James Pinker, the largest literary agent of the time, in Paris with Maurice Dekobra and Denyse Clairouin, and correspondents in Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam.

In 1933, Augusto was joined by his son Luciano, who was very young at that time but driven by a similar passion for books. A refined translator and sensitive reader, Luciano had an innate talent for scouting.

The agency's business grew and contacts were established with publishers for whom Ali offered to publish foreign authors until 1938, when racial laws substantially limited the numbers of authors and works that passed the censor. Dealings were very intense with Mondadori and also with Dall'Oglio, Bompiani, Salani, Frassinelli, Marzocco, Editoriale Domus and with many publishing houses which no longer exist such as Ceresini, Carabba, Monanni, Editrice Popolare Milanese, Casa Edizioni X, Edizioni della Quercia, etc.