Confini e migrazioni nel romanzo Le parole la notte di Francesco Biamonti

Francesco Biamonti (1928-2001) was an Italian novelist whose literary production is almost entirely devoted to the westernmost area of Liguria and especially to its relations with France. Literary critics have already examined the geographical aspects 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 procedures of geopoetics – as developed by F. Italiano (2009) – to an analysis of Biamonti’s “geographical consciousness”, as it unfolds in his last novel Le parole la notte, published in 1998 and translated into French (1999), German (2000), and Spanish (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.