Marco Belpoliti’s latest book makes for essential reading. It charts the landscapes of Northern Italy closest to his heart, interweaving lyrical nature writing with recollections of people, objects and encounters, adding literary allusions to travellers’ impressions. What emerges is a tapestry of knowledge and memory spoken in the first person,...
while also offering a coherent, persuasive portrait of those lands, which he observes with empathy and a keen, human and intellectual curiosity.
Milan, Monza, Brianza and Bergamo, and later the “Nord Nord” – Chiasso and the regions beyond the frontier – follow on from each other in Belpoliti’s memoir like the pages of an atlas, their images and episodes coming alive in the book’s thirty‑six chapters. We learn of photographers, artists and writers, whom he has met and frequented over the years and who have shaped Italian culture in recent decades – Alberto Arbasino, Marina Ballo, Gabriele Basilico, Mario Dondero, Enzo Mari, Lea Vergine, and the Sicilian émigrés to the North, Vincenzo Consolo and Ferdinando Scianna – capturing their world‑view in a single gesture or remembered moment. Rivers, mountains, hillsides, furtive creatures, exotic plants, primordial rock formations and collections of everyday objects reveal personal rituals which, taken together, constitute a snapshot of an era.
In Nord Nord, Belpoliti consolidates the literary genre he launched with Pianura in 2021: a way of talking of his own experience as seen through places, objects, spaces and encounters that always interact with their author. The concept is what he attributes in the book to Mario Dondero – “in his shots there was not just the person depicted, but him as well”and “all his pictures are selfies of others”.
Nor is there any shortage of references to Stendhal’s amorous escapades at Oggiono in this marvellous, at times sentimental, journey that indissolubly binds his own personal identity to the maps of places he has known, inhabited and loved.
Nord Nord
Marco Belpoliti
Einaudi, 2025
