Google and Italy haven't been seeing eye to eye lately, but perhaps there's hope yet with the announcement of a partnership between the company and Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage to scan and add historical books from the National Libraries of Florence and Rome to the Google Books project. Google has signed with several other big libraries around the world, but these are the first in Italy.

"Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture," Gino Mattiuzzo, strategic partner development manager at Google Italy, writes.

The deal itself is pretty standard, similar to the ones Google has already signed with other public partners. Google will scan books provided by the two libraries, up to one million volumes, which will then be made available in Google Books for the world to see. This should add to the over ten million titles of public domain, out-of-copyright books that the search giant has already scanned and made available since the project began.

Interestingly, Google seems to be indicating that the books it will scan will be made available to other digital library projects, notably the European Commission's Europeana, a joint project by government agencies and several big libraries in the old continent to preserve and house European works in an online repository.

The subtle irony here is that Europeana was created precisely to counter Google Books with concerns that the continent's cultural heritage couldn't be left to the whims of a big, private corporation, especially an American one. As the Europeans found, and Google has been claiming for years, digitizing books was a time consuming and expensive undertaking, which is likely why the European project is now looking at Google for help, not the first time something like this has happened.