[3] The Rizzoli Bookstore is indirectly owned by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, an Italian multimedia company, having acquired the books division from RCS MediaGroup.

In the 1960s, Roberto Polo, investment manager, art collector, and would-be design mogul worked part-time at Rizzoli while a graduate student at Columbia.

Additional stores later opened in Boston, Massachusetts; Costa Mesa, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and San Francisco, California; Dallas, Texas; Oak Brook, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 2012, a similar store opened in Saks Fifth Avenue, featuring a curated selection of books on fashion, design, entertaining, interiors, special travel destinations and New York.

[12][13] On April 11, 2014, Rizzoli closed its flagship store on West 57th Street in New York, under the protest of customers and preservationists, when its lease expired.

Rizzoli Bookstore has been used as a prominent location in the films Falling in Love (1984), Manhattan (1979), and True Story (2015), in addition to television series such as Seinfeld.