Gabriele Zanetto e il postmoderno

This article discusses the relationship between Italian geographer Gabriele Zanetto and 'the postmodern". More specifically, it reflects on his writings directly addressing the postmodern by linking them to his intellectual profile and academic persona. The key argument is that Zanetto, at least in some crucial moments of his career, was faced with the challenges typical of every scholar preoccupied with the complex transition between the modern an the postmodern. What emerges is a scholarly and intellectual profile torn between the desire to go with the flow of the postmodern wave and its relativism, on the one hand, and the (modern) academic tendency to look for systematic classifications of the new trends, in geography and beyond. Zanetto's work has indeed engaged with the postmodern in some path breaking interventions where he disserts on the epochal shifts and the epistemological consequences of this paradigmatic change for the discipline, but also for the contemporary production and circulation of knowledge at large. The article ends by suggesting that some of these tensions reflect at the same time a radical in the ways in which understand geography as a discipline as well as some of the most original and fascinating characteristics of his academic personality, a personality that perhaps in the 'postmodern writings' has offered some of the most significant contribution to the field.