Italian Language Geography

Italian academic geography is characterized by a rather peculiar structuring, which while suffering from internal fragmentation and discontinuity, presents threads and episodes of extraordinary scholarship, especially on the part of small groups of individuals. Such 'disciplinary threads' are informed by the work of some prominent geographers and pivot on a virtuous interconnection of places, events, and publications that, in a very broad sense, make up the Italian geographical tradition of the last few decades. Key topics (and related scholars) include: Farinelli's theory of cartographic reason, a revolutionary rethinking of the relation between Western thought and a cartographic understanding of society and space; Dematteis' work on the power of geographical metaphors and his pathbreaking reflection on the concept of urban milieu; Turco's cultural analysis of the notions of territoriality and territorialization, and his contribution to the development of a geographical theory of complexity; Vallega's work on the concepts of region and regionalization grounded on a geographical interpretation of systems theory. Together with such highly individualized threads, other 'sites' have influenced the Italian geographical debate, from the Palermo School of cultural geography, to the work on humanistic and postmodern geography at the University of Venice, to the innovative development geographies of the 'L'Orientale' Institute in Napoli.