Special Campiello 2025

Special Campiello / The finalists

Making Italian Geography a Novel

'North North', by Marco Belpoliti, is the second novel in a trilogy linked to places on our peninsula. It is about the uncertain and fluctuating north of a country in the south of Europe

13 September 2025

3' min read

Marco Belpoliti, writer, essayist, university lecturer, director of Riga and founder of Doppiozero, as well as editor of the complete works of Primo Levi, has recently turned to geography, narrogeography, graphogeography... In short, to the transformation of geography into narrative. After the novel-essay Pianura, with which he won the Comisso and Dessí prizes, he is a finalist at the Campiello with another novel-essay: Nord Nord (Einaudi, pp. 288, euro 20)

Could you describe it?

In no other country is the North as changeable, fluctuating and uncertain as Italy. Everyone says: it is further north. Yet we are a country in the south of Europe. North North is a journey to one of the many possible places in the Bel Paese to the north, a rectangle that lies between Brianza, the one loved by Stendhal and hated by Gadda; Milan, which has lost its affability; Bergamo, home of Harlequin and the place where Lorenzo Lotto worked; and then Monza with its Corona ferrea, a forgery without an author; and then there are also the woods with erratic boulders and earthworms, ladybirds in the garage and bats behind the shutters of the house in Mondonico. One encounters landscapes but also characters, who make up an unusual and fascinating portrait of this North: mushroom pickers, photographers, plant lovers, designers, writers, colour scholars, artists, poets and poetesses, living and dead. We go up to Chiasso in search of migrant plants and proceed to cook cod, a fish of the North, following Artusi's instructions; and finally we go to Val Pusteria to find the source of the longest Italian river whose waters end up in the Black Sea: is he in the North?

Why did you feel the need to tell this story?

It is the story, or rather it is the stories that found me. They took a long time, almost fifty years or maybe more. They have been watered down for years inside drawers in the house, behind the masonry of the climbs around the house, on sheets and slips of paper, and in the wide margins of old notebooks, inside envelopes, and then also in my head. Gradually it took shape over four years, even retrieving things written in its time, following rough and chaotic indexes. The need came one day: to compose the book. And I started to do it.

How did you decide to tell the story, through what narrative and stylistic choices?

The fundamental narrative choice is that of the invention of the 'you', that is, of a person to whom the story is told as it is told, as had already happened in Pianura, the book that is the antecedent to this one. A you who is also the reader to whom the narrative voice is telling the story itself. The style is flat, with a limited number of subordinates, but never paratactic, except when necessary. This is not a deliberate choice, it rather stems from the narrator's setting; it has a colloquial flow, precisely a dialogue with an absent you, who never takes the floor, yet is there, and is present in the narrator's memory.

Are you already working on a next book? If so, can you anticipate anything?

I originally thought of three books, a kind of Italian trilogy. Three, an odd number, is a perfect number because it is open; it does not end in the solitary unity of the one or in the chiselled dialogue of the two. The order then was not certain, it depended on contingent situations, on sudden flashes, because I did not know where I would begin and then continue. Now all I have left is the third, which I thought of first at university, almost an unwritten thesis, but which became a short story, moving from non-fiction to narrative form. I do not want to say the subject and the place it will be about, for superstition's sake, but it will still be dedicated to a portion of Italy and will be linked to a story about my family, my father.

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