Humboldt Books

Humboldt Books is a brand-new Italian publishing house focused on travel literature that draws inspiration from scientific explorations of the 18th and 19th centuries. Humboldt collects multidisciplinary experiences, combines knowledge and practices for recounting travels and countries with a watchful and unconventional eye.

We have these titles in our programme:

Invernomuto: Negus is a further development of the Negus project, which originated from a very specific historical event dating back to the time of the Italian occupation in Ethiopia in 1936, when a wounded soldier was forced to return to Vernasca, and the community there organized a joyful and obscure ritual in the main square. The book contains an extensive visual section developed drawing on various personal archives, two unpublished essays and an interview.


zabriskie_humboldt_books_favini_arrivederciArrivederci is Ettore Favini’s travel diary and the story that follows his trips through Sardinia in search of the old textile traditions of the island.The diary is meant to give a face and a past to each fabric Favini collected or that was given to him

zabriskie_humboldt_books_claudia_losi_how_do_i_imagine_being_there In How do I imagine being there?, Claudia Losi lets the voices of a writer, a semiologist and a cinema historian, a geographer, a biologist and a naturalist, a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist and an artist describe the idea of an „archipelago world“ – on the basis of her visit of the remote and deserted St Kilda island in the Outer Hebrides, which the last human inhabitant left in 1930.


Roman Signer’s A Step Towards the Sea tells the relationship between the artist and Italy through a selection of installation views and video works. The accompanying DVD includes an unreleased film and a documentation on every actions carried out in Italy by Signer since the 1990s. Signer’s bond with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio

zabriskie_detour_in_detroit Francesca Berardi’s Detour in Detroit is an emotional and practical book about the city, mapped through a series of encounters with its people. She collected stories, ideas and feelings, set within what seems to be a real movement of urban resistance.

zabriskie_railway_flora_humboldt_books.jpg - 1For Railway Flora, Ernesto Schick devoted a decade of his life (1969-1978) to observe, classify and illustrate the wild vegetation that infests the grounds of the international railway marshalling yard in Chiasso. First published in 1980, Railway Flora has maintained all its original charm.