The locations of Nord Sud Ovest Est – The Legendary Story of 883, the highly anticipated second season of the series about Max Pezzali and Mauro Repetto, available from October 9, 2026 exclusively on Sky and streaming on NOW, are biographically tied to the musical and personal events of the protagonists. The historic center of a quiet Italian town, the elegant aristocratic palaces and the tall office-filled skyscrapers of large cities, and even a vast American desert are the same—or almost the same—as the backdrop that fueled the duo’s success. The setting and the places where the 883 series was filmed by Sydney Sibilia, however, as the director has often explained, have as an equally important task to evoke a certain 1990s atmosphere.
What it’s about
In the second and final season of the series about the 883, the year is 1993 and Max Pezzali (Elia Nuzzolo) and Mauro Repetto (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli) are realizing their dream of reaching the top of the charts. While they work on the new album – “Nord Sud Ovest Est,” from which the season takes its title – something between them begins to change. The moment of immense success they are experiencing leads them first to Milano and then, later, to that America they had dreamed of since childhood. Yet, seen from the inside, the twins’ lives are far messier than outward appearances suggest, and doubts about their future in music, about individual ambitions, and even about their friendship become increasingly burdensome.
Where the series was filmed
The locations of Nord Sud Ovest Est – The Legendary Story of 883 span from Pavia to Turin, to Rome and the Lazio coast, with a few episodes also shot in Spain.
Pavia
The city where Max Pezzali and Mauro Repetto grew up, wrote their first songs, and began to imagine music as what they would do when they grew up could not be missing from the series. In this second season, however, Pavia plays a more secondary role than in Hanno ucciso l’uomo ragno (Who Killed Spider-Man); the events depicted, after all, take the duo farther from the Lombard town toward national success.
On screen you can still recognize the cobbled alleys of the historic center, the streets along the Ticino River, and the iconic Ponte Coperto: a 14th-century bridge rebuilt on the traces of an ancient Roman bridge, notable for its roofed structure and that over time has become the city’s symbol.
Also Borgo Ticino, the picturesque medieval village beyond the river once frequented by washerwomen, fishermen, and gravel miners, served as a set for the second season of the Sky series about the 883.
As the production (Sky Studios and Groenlandia) has repeatedly explained, although Max Pezzali participated in choosing the locations, the places used in the series (the flower shop belonging to his family, the tavern where he started making music, Silvia’s house, etc.) do not always correspond exactly to the real ones, largely for logistical and organizational reasons.
Turin
In Turin, the locations for the second season of the 883 series are mostly in the center: with their elegant palaces and refined Liberty-era architectures in spots like Piazza San Carlo and Via Po, the good living room of the Piedmont capital, they lend themselves well to representing the cliché of the Italian big city in the 1990s.
Rome and the Lazio coast
The same can be said for Rome, which, with more than 100 days of filming, emerges as the place where Nord Sud Ovest Est – The Legendary Story of 883 was shot for the longest time.
The production, so far, has not released details about the Roman locations: what can be said with certainty is that the sets were distributed around different parts of the city, capturing corners capable of representing the Milano of the time with glossed fashion runways, American-inspired recording studios, and large concerts and international events.
Among the locations of the second season of Sydney Sibilia’s series on 883 reported online is Ardea: the city just south of Rome, and more specifically its seaside fraction, are among the stretches of the Lazio coast chosen to backdrop the new adventures of Pezzali and Repetto.
In this new chapter the duo, fresh from the success of the first album, arrives in the United States, fulfilling a dream they had nurtured since childhood and since the days of the first songs composed in their parents’ tavern. On screen, Max Pezzali and Mauro Repetto are seen speeding along the wide, boundless American highways, so ingrained in the collective imagination of the United States.
A curious detail is that these scenes were not actually filmed in America, but in the Tuscia viterbese. Moving a few kilometers north of Rome, the production found roads that go straight for miles and miles, surrounded by a stark, sometimes desert-like landscape and bathed in daylight that rivals the highways of America. These roads include the Provinciale delle Quattro Dogane (listed by several online sources) and located near Montalto di Castro, a town in Lazio’s Maremma, famous for its Green Flag beaches as well as the Vulci Archaeological Park.
Almería and the “American” desert
Even the other scenes set in the American desert, where Pezzali and Repetto went to shoot videos and other promotional material for the album “Nord Sud Ovest Est,” were not actually filmed in the United States.
In search of sun-baked, barren landscapes that resembled the real ones, the series production headed to Almería. This Andalusian city, famous for its tapas and for some of Spain’s most beautiful beaches, boasts over three thousand hours of sunshine per year and is therefore perfect for recreating the desert atmosphere.
So perfect that, well before Sibilia and his crew arrived, it had already been chosen as the set for great Western classics by Sergio Leone. Desierto de Tabernas, a site of geographical and scenic interest a few kilometers from the city, is not only the only desert in Europe that can be considered such but is certainly the most cinematic there is and frequented by nature lovers, cinema enthusiasts, and set-jetting fans alike.
