The following thesis proposes analysing the literary representation of Northern Italy and Venice in four twentieth-century novels: The Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole (written in 1908, published in 1934) by Frederick Rolfe, Arctic Summer (started in 1911, published in 1980) by E.M. Forster, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) by Edith Wharton and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) by Ernest Hemingway. Both Venice and Northern Italy are traditionally associated with literature; both have been abundantly studied and written, so much so that the subject seems to have been exhausted. The porous aspect of the city, which is halfway between water and land, makes a clear distinction between what is Venice and what is not Venice impossible. Facing this multiplicity of cultural representations and writings, James Buzard identifies the emergence of a sense of belatedness felt among writers writing about Venice in the nineteenth century: “For the nineteenth-century (anti-) tourist, to the problem of being one of a crowd was added that of being late on the scene” (107). While there is a well-established canon of twentieth-century writing on Venice from the perspective of visitors to the city in a range of fictional registers, (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley), none of the selected works have been extensively studied, unlike some other works written by the same writers. This thesis aims to augment scholarship on this period of time with the works under consideration; it also hopes to do justice to the complexity and originality of the chosen novels. Through different theoretical lenses, this thesis employs a method of close comparative and analytical readings to allow the recovery of the texts not as single entities but as works already part of a canon. Such a reading created unexpected points of encounter and disjunctions between writers and texts that have not, or rarely, been studied together.