Campana proposed a series of conjectures relating algebro-geometric and complex-analytic properties of algebraic varieties and their arithmetic. The main ingredient is the definition of the class of special varieties, which is the key for a new functorial classification of algebraic varieties, that is more suitable to answer arithmetic questions. In the talk we will review the main conjectures and constructions, and we will discuss some recent results that give evidence for some of these conjectures. This is joint work with E. Rousseau and J. Wang.