Borders and migrations in Francesco Biamonti’s novel Le parole la notte

Francesco Biamonti (1928-2001) was an Italian novelist whose literary production is almost entirely devoted to the westernmostarea of Liguria and especially to its relations with France. Literary critics have already examined the geographicalaspects of his novels, including the dimension of borders and frontiers: notable in this regard is Il confine del paesaggio(Bertone, 2006). In the current paper, I set out to contribute to this line of enquiry by applying the methods and the proceduresof geopoetics – as developed by F. Italiano (2009) – to an analysis of Biamonti’s “geographical consciousness”, as itunfolds in his last novel Le parole la notte, published in 1998 and translated into French (1999), German (2000), andSpanish (2004). The aim of my research is to shift from “the border of the landscape” to “the landscape of the border” – i.e.to the “borderscape” – by examining the words used by Biamonti himself in his novel.

Keywords: borderscapes, migrations, geopoetics, Liguria, Francesco Biamonti.