Il Foglio Paywall: How to Read Il Foglio Articles for Free
Il Foglio, Rome's daily of ideas founded by Giuliano Ferrara, keeps its columns and reporting for subscribers. How the paywall works and how to read it in full.
Paywall behaviour last tested
Il Foglio is the Rome daily of ideas and commentary founded in 1996 by Giuliano Ferrara and edited since 2015 by Claudio Cerasa. It is small by circulation and large by influence: a paper of long argued pieces on Italian politics, the Church, foreign affairs, books and the culture wars, written in a house style that is combative, erudite and often funny, and read closely by the people it writes about. It also publishes an English edition of selected pieces at ilfoglio.it/en. Almost everything on the site is reserved for subscribers, and the pages themselves declare that the article is not free to read, so a reader arriving from a link usually sees the opening lines and a subscription offer. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.
How the Il Foglio paywall works
Il Foglio runs a subscriber paywall. Rather than metering a monthly allowance, it marks its articles as paid content and asks non-subscribers to log in or take out a subscription to read past the first paragraph. As far as we can tell a handful of news items and some promotional pieces are open, but the columns and reported pieces that make the paper worth reading are closed from the first visit.
The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are logged in as a subscriber and replaces the body with the subscription prompt. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters: Il Foglio looks hard from the outside but is enforced like a soft one. Note that Il Foglio writes in long paragraphs, so the paragraph counts below are small for the word counts.
Our tests on 22 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 633-word Il Foglio politics piece, written after days of street violence in Italian cities, arguing that parents have a duty to remind their children why to love the West at least as much as a Prada shoe, loaded in full, all 4 long paragraphs.
- An 863-word Il Foglio English-edition piece on Pope Leo XIV telephoning Zelensky after calling Putin, with the aim of securing a truce, loaded in full, all 7 paragraphs.
- An 857-word Il Foglio English-edition foreign piece on the network Khalifa Haftar is trying to forge with Netanyahu, Vance and Guilfoyle after a secret meeting in Abu Dhabi loaded in full, all 6 paragraphs.
Read an Il Foglio article in full
- Copy the article link. Il Foglio links look like ilfoglio.it/politica/2026/10/21/news/ followed by a slug and a numeric id, and English-edition pieces sit under ilfoglio.it/en/.
- Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
- The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.
The reader shows the article in Italian, or in English for the English edition, exactly as Il Foglio published it. If you want an Italian piece in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.
Other approaches
- The English edition. Il Foglio translates a selection of its foreign, religion and political pieces into English at ilfoglio.it/en, which is the easiest way to follow the paper if you do not read Italian.
- Newsletters. Il Foglio sends free email bulletins that summarise the day's pieces and link to them.
- Library access. Il Foglio is carried on PressReader, which many public libraries in Italy, the UK and North America offer free to cardholders.
- Related free sources. Italian parliamentary records, government statements and Vatican communiqués are published free, and much of Il Foglio's political and religious reporting can be checked against them.
How it compares with other Italian papers
Il Foglio is one of the few Italian titles that passes cleanly. In the same tests Il Messaggero returned two full stories and one preview, Il Post returned one full piece but mostly short extracts, and Il Sole 24 Ore gave extracts too short to call complete, so none of those is listed. Corriere della Sera loaded in full in our September tests but is not yet tagged. Two other European titles that do work are the Dutch quality daily NRC and the French geopolitics magazine Revue Conflits. The full list of sites that work is kept current, and our guide to sites that cannot be bypassed explains what to do about the rest.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
Il Foglio is a small paper that survives on its readers rather than on advertising. If you read Cerasa's editorials and the paper's long pieces every week, a digital subscription, which is modest by the standards of the big dailies, is the right way to keep it going.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Il Foglio and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Who runs Il Foglio?
Il Foglio was founded in Rome in 1996 by Giuliano Ferrara, the former minister and television host, who edited it for nearly two decades. Claudio Cerasa has been its editor since 2015. It publishes a print edition, a website and an English edition of selected pieces.
Does the reader work on subscriber-only Il Foglio articles?
Yes. All three articles in our 22 October 2026 tests, one in Italian and two from the English edition, loaded in full. Il Foglio delivers the text in the page and hides it with a script, which the reader does not run.
Does it work on Corriere della Sera or Il Sole 24 Ore too?
Corriere della Sera loaded in full in our September 2026 tests but is not yet tagged. Il Sole 24 Ore returned extracts too short to call complete, Il Messaggero gave one preview in three tests and Il Post mostly short extracts, so none of those is listed.