Discovering Otherness, Empowering the Nation: Italian Geographical Societies and Their Dual Trajectory

This paper analyses the political role of geographical ideas and institutions in Italy before and after the 1861 national unification, with a focus on the two major Italian geographical societies: the Società Geografica Italiana of Rome (Italian Geographical Society – SGI), and the Società di Studi Geografici e Coloniali of Florence (Society of Geographical and Colonial Studies – SSGC). The SGI was founded in 1867 and dominated by politicians, diplomats, and the military until the end of the century. Its main occupation soon became to study and explore African regions in support of the government’s quest for a colonial empire. The SSGC was founded in Florence in 1895 by academic geographers around Giovanni Marinelli as a scientific alternative to the SGI. However, the SSGC soon entered colonial research as well, under the leadership of the late Marinelli’s son Olinto. Moreover, its supposedly unpolitical research on the division of Italy’s regions and the definition of its northern borders, led by both Marinellis, provided the Irredentism movement with “scientific” arguments to incorporate mostly German and Slavic border regions such as South Tyrol (Alto Adige) and Istria into the Italian nation. During World War I, the SGI joined these efforts by promoting Italian toponyms for those regions, which first had been devised for South Tyrol by Ettore Tolomei. After the war, both societies went on with nationalism and colonialism, even when these turned into violent imperialism under the fascist regime.