Zibaldone by Campo | Book presentation by Veii publications

On Thursday, January 23rd, 2025 Zibaldone will be presented at the MAXXI Museum in Rome.

Zibaldone by Campo, the latest book published by Veii, is a collective portrait of the architectural debate over the past decade, inviting readers to navigate its diverse content and construct their own pathways through the volume. This dynamic book blends text and imagery, functioning as a diary, atlas, scrapbook, and visual essay. 

Campo, a project by Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro, and Davide Sacconi, emerged as a space dedicated to the exploration of architecture and its surrounding conversations.

Located within the arches of the Felice aqueduct in Rome, Campo’s raw, industrial setting became a hub for creative dialogue. It hosted an array of exhibitions, workshops, book presentations, and discussions, seamlessly blending the intellectual and cultural energy of Rome with global architectural discourse. Showcasing the contributions of over 100 collaborators, the book captures Campo’s unmatched activity as a platform for debate, research, and celebration of architecture.

Moving freely across mediums, disciplines and generations, Zibaldone is a collective portrait of the debate on architecture and the city of the past decade. Half text, half images, diary and anthology, atlas and scrapbook, postcard collection and visual essay, Zibaldone invites the readers to build their paths, drawing constellations from a network of points. As such, the book opens a reflection on the curatorial practice as a means to construct common knowledge about architecture, enlarging horizons and multiplying agencies.

Zibaldone records Campo’s activity as a dynamic platform gathering a multitude of experiments, enquiries and research methods by more than 100 contributors.

Zibaldone invites readers to reflect through two interconnected lenses: “Thoughts”, a chronology based on Campo’s events agenda, and “Atlas”, its visual counterpart acting as a dynamic collage of images that mirrors the complexity of Rome. These two sections interact with one another to encourage an open-ended exploration of architecture’s evolving narratives.

The book takes cues from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri, an intricate index and a personal collection of a vast array of notes, reflections, and aphorisms penned between 1817 and 1932.

“The term zibaldone seemed an excellent way to frame the diverse enquiries and protagonists, but it also provided a loose model for this volume, which sometimes feels like orderly chaos.”

— asserts Valerio Di Lucente, editor and co-founder of Veii. 

This sentiment echoes throughout Zibaldone, which embraces architecture’s dialogue between permanence and temporality. The book holds new perspectives for architectural debate, fostering shared knowledge and expanding the boundaries of curatorial practice by recording Campo’s decade-long journey.

VEII

Veii is a publishing imprint devoted to visual culture and critical enquiries into art, photography, architecture & design, focusing on upcoming and forgotten figures, blending past and future visions.

Campo

Campo is a space to debate, study and celebrate architecture. We think of the initiatives of Campo as liturgies of knowledge through which we can patiently construct a common archive of works, a fortress against the evanescence of memory and the instability of meaning. Every project is a gesture that establishes a temporary gravitational centre and boundary, a ritual act to frame a time for understanding, a space for discussion and a ground for the celebration of architecture. Campo stands as a project by Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro, and Davide Sacconi.