Living with austerity, rebuilding care. Social infrastructures in crisis and practices of self-organization in Antico Corso, Catania. – This paper examines how the dismantling and partial rebuilding of care-related social infrastructures in the Antico Corso neighbourhood of Catania has reshaped everyday life and local power relations. The closure of three historic hospitals—an outcome of prolonged urban austerity—has profoundly altered the neighbourhood’s sense of place. Drawing on a qualitative approach that includes ethnography, interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, the paper shows how institutional narratives present these closures as inevitable and beneficial, legitimizing top-down “urban regeneration” while excluding residents from meaningful decision-making. Many inhabitants respond with a mix of anger and resignation, perceiving the loss of the hospitals as a wound to the neighbourhood’s identity. At the same time, feminist collectives, civic committees, and grassroots organizations are developing alternative narratives and practices of social and territorial care. These initiatives contribute to redefining the neighbourhood from below and contest the spatial consequences of austerity. The paper argues that the crisis of social reproduction manifests not only as an economic issue, but as a spatial and political struggle that generates both new forms of marginalization and innovative practices of resistance and belonging. The case of Catania highlights the specificities and contradictions of austerity urbanism in Southern Italy.

Counter-Geographies of Wine: Marginal Viticultural Practices and the Transition To-ward a Post-Alcoholic Enotourism. The Role of Acquata. – This article proposes a critical re-reading of contemporary wine geographies through the notion of counter-geographies, focusing on acquata—a traditional post-fermentative beverage derived from the rehydration of grape pomace—as an epistemic and territorial device capable of reconfiguring the cultural and ecological meanings of wine production. Building on the theoretical framework of post-alcoholic enotourism, the study explores how emerging “NoLo” (no- and low-alcohol) consumption regimes intersect with transformations in rural landscapes, sustainability policies, and socio-symbolic practices of conviviality. Historical and geographical analysis reveals that acquata, far from being a marginal residue of pre-industrial viticulture, embodies a vernacular knowledge system rooted in circular use of resources, social equity, and ecological restraint. Its historical erasure through modern regulatory frameworks reflects broader processes of epistemic and territorial exclusion within capitalist agri-food regimes. By reactivating ac-quata as a cultural and political tool, the paper advances the hypothesis of a regenerative geography of wine, in which residual practices and marginal knowledges serve as generative forces for more inclusive, sustainable, and plural forms of enotourism and territorial identity.

Climate Crisis and Tourism in the Maira and Vermenagna Valleys (Piedmont Alps). – This study examines the transformations driven by climate change in the alpine context, focussing on the Maira and Vermenagna Valleys in the Piedmont Alps, two areas marked by environmental vulnerability and significant exposure to ongoing climatic and socio-economic pressures. The research explores how rising temperatures and decreasing snowfall are significantly reshaping the local tourism supply, requiring a reorganisation of the sector.
Combining in-depth interviews with local stakeholders and quantitative analysis of tourism and climate data, the study reveals a growing awareness of the phenomenon and its socioeconomic impacts. The climate crisis has exposed the unsustainability of traditional ski-based tourism, prompting a shift toward more resilient models such as experiential, outdoor, and cul-tural tourism.
While the Maira Valley shows greater adaptability thanks to an already di-versified offer, the Vermenagna Valley, historically reliant on alpine skiing, struggles to transition. The findings highlight the urgent need for locally coordinated strategies that integrate sustainability, cultural identity, and innovation.

Urban green spaces and community roots: the social infrastructure of Parco Uditore (Palermo). – This article examines how urban green spaces act as social infrastructures capable of countering fragmentation in contexts marked by austerity, marginalisation and the erosion of collective life. Drawing on critical perspectives on roots and identity, it interprets green-space care as a form of re-rooting through which communities rebuild relations, memories and shared attachments. Using Parco Uditore in Palermo as a case study, the article explores how bottom-up management fosters social cohesion, produces territorial knowledge and supports new forms of citizenship, while also revealing structural vulnerabilities and limits to replicability. The findings show how community-led green spaces can rekindle bonds of place and open pathways toward more shared and meaningful ways of inhabiting the city.

Geographies of the sacred: the sanctuary of the SS. Trinità of Vallepietra between tradi-tion, territorial identity, and new practices. – The Sanctuary of the Santissima Trinità of Vallepietra represents an emblematic place where faith, tradition, and new social and territorial practices converge. This study examines how this sacred space continues to hold strong spiritual significance while also embracing new dynamics related to slow and sustainable travel. Younger generations are rediscovering pilgrimage through paths that combine spirituality with a search for territorial authenticity, maintaining a strong connection with tradition. The “companies” of pilgrims, symbolically united by banners and the practice of gatherings, perpetuate an identity bond with the territory, reinterpreting their belonging through a lens of re-territorialization. In this context, events related to pilgrimages and gatherings of banners are seen as practices of reclaiming the territory, strengthening the bond with the local community, and reaffirming the collective meaning of the sacred site. The approach of the Holy Year 2025 and the extraordinary Jubilee of 2033 has renewed attention to these places, intensifying the process of re-territorialization and reinforcing the bond between spirituality and territory. This study shows that, although influenced by socio-cultural changes, sanctuaries remain focal points of collective identity and territorial relationships, able to evolve without losing their original religious significance.

Territorial management and promotion of the tourism offer: a study on the city of Benevento. – This paper explores tourism management in the Sannio region, focusing on Benevento. It highlights the importance of integrating the region’s natural, cultural, and gastronomic resources into a cohesive tourism offer. Through surveys and interviews with visitors, the study identifies key strengths, such as the region’s unique identity and attractions, but also highlights challenges like limited accessibility and inadequate infrastructure. Wellness, nature-based, and cultural tourism are identified as high-potential growth segments. The paper recommends strategic, integrated management, including infrastructure improvements, targeted marketing, and collaborative governance to enhance tourism developTerritorial management, Proximity tourism, Tourism, Territo-rial competitivenessment and competitiveness.

Re-think Rome, re-generate the peripheries. The Jubilee 2025. – The importance of major events for the territorial development of Rome highlights how they have influenced urban planning choices throughout history. Rome has alternated between positive and cautious approaches toward such events over time. In particular, the Jubilee, whether in its regular or extraordinary programming, demands a planning approach that balances Rome’s identity as both a capital and an apostolic seat. The Jubilee 2025 offers an opportunity to rethink and regenerate the urban development of Rome, not only in the central neighborhoods but also in the peripheries. This contribution focuses on the urban planning project for Jubilee 2025, with particular emphasis on the southeastern quadrant of the city, to evaluate whether the proposed actions can effectively address the socio-territorial challenges faced by areas such as Tor Vergata and Tor Bella Monaca.

Major events and local identity. The case of “la notte della taranta” in Salento. – Major events are often created to enhance or regenerate territorial attractiveness. The goal is not only to maximize the economic and employment impacts that can directly affect the event itself but also to attract the attention of investors, tourists, and institutions to invest resources and projects in the territory. In reality, these events, in addition to their attractiveness purposes, also have generative purposes, potentially contributing to strengthening the sense of belonging within the local community, territorial cohesion, and, consequently, the affective and financial investment of individual inhabitants as well as the community as a whole. This contribution, starting from the analysis of the summarised interpretative framework, aims to evaluate the effects of the Notte della Taranta on the territory and the Salento identity over a quarter of a century.

Sardinia between transhumance and the Blue Zone. Socio-spatial dynamics, rural lifestyle and diet of a geographical area of exceptional longevity: Ogliastra. – The rural dimension of Sardinia is strongly represented by the historical and social role assumed by agricultural activities on the island, which have always been characterised by transhumance phenomena (in Sardinia Tramuda) that, at different scales from the rest of Italy, have characterised some Sardinian rural territories (Ortu, 1988; Lai, 1998). Ogliastra has long been one of the lands of transhumance in Sardinia (Schiavone, Schiavone, 2014), and is marked by a high number of long-lived individuals (Blue Zone), for which, the rural environment, lifestyle and local interrelation-ships and genetics have influenced the health status in this area (Pes and Poulain, 2014). The work aims to investigate the socio-spatial dimension of food production linked to the rural (transhumant) culture of Ogliastra, trying to understand the configurations of territoriality (Turco, 2010) and how this socio-spatial, rural and food model may have influenced the particular longevity of the area. The Blue Zone diet, in fact, typical of transhumant territories, can become a catalyst for the sustainable devel-opment not only of Sardinia but also of many small Mediterranean rural areas and, furthermore, can facilitate the re-appropriation by the younger generations of their ancient identity heritage.

Geography of Souls in the Comedy. – The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how the geographical dimension is very important in a work like the Commedia, despite it being set in an ‘aldilà’ with a totally fantastic topography. Among the many geographical references that can be traced back, particularly significant are those connected and provided directly by the souls that Dante meets, so much so that it is possible to speak of a real ‘geography of souls’ in the Comedy.

Requalification of peripheries with an industrial background: the case-study of Mirafiori in Turin. – The paper intends to develop a reflection, starting from the case of the Mirafiori neighbourhood in Turin, on the role that the peripheries can adopt as a laboratory of transversal innovation in the field of urban design, policy, governance, active citizenship and overall the global themes of Agenda 2030 (United Nations, 2015). The Mirafiori neighbourhood can be highlighted as an emblematic case, since it is an industrial suburb closely connected with the former FIAT (now Stellantis) industrial plant. Over the years, the neighbourhood has suffered a socio-demographic and identity crisis, and over time numerous projects have been launched to address these crises. Participation in European projects insisting on the neighbourhood allows us to be privileged observers and actors for: the re-designing and re-qualification of Mirafiori Sud through the realisation of Nature-based Solutions, useful to strengthen and increase the connection of the food system, a tool for social inclusion and territorial development, as well as to increase the envi-ronmental value of the already existing natural elements; to address activities with a Place-based Education approach, useful in the redesigning of spaces. The analysis of projects settled in Mirafiori is needed in order to assess the possibility of constructing new urban centralities starting from marginal places.

Dante’s itinerarium: geographies for knowledge of the elsewhere. – The itinerary traveled by Dante to the three reigns of the afterlife and narrated in the Divine Commedia is emblematic of a type of knowledge journey that places physical and metaphysical realities on the same stage and considers the cultural identity of the narrating self and the geographical characteristics of the elsewhere voyaged by the traveler-narrator. This paper aims to offer, from a geographical perspective, an insight into the mean-ing of travel, considering not only the material geographic reality, but also the perceptual and symbolic dimension that is given to spatiality by persons and communities that identify with a specific culture.

"The secular city, the religious city (1870-1915); The Shadow of the Capital: the impact of the capital's relocation on the geography of Rome and Italy 150 years later; From Rome Capital to the G-20. Identity, protection and conservation of the archaeological and architectural heritage"

Landscape education as a practice of geographical mediation in the processes of resignification of places and reduction of conflicts in San Lorenzo district in Rome. – San Lorenzo district has a marked historical-identity component which, however, has not managed to safeguard the neighbourhood from phenomena of deterritorialization and gentrification. The main cause of the recent condition of degradation and conflict has to be found in the urban layout which has triggered a series of interferences in the identity of the place, for example the external pressures exerted by the university. In this case, therefore, the “configurative profile” (Turco, 2010), made up of relationships, emotions and feelings, has been impoverished and has been transformed.
In this context are inserted the landscape education practices (Turco, 2020) promoted by geographers of Sapienza University of Rome, which propose themselves as cultural mediators in the process of re-signification of places and spaces. The presence in the field and the response to the cultural requests from the immediate surroundings of the University have been translated into events open to the public such as the International Night of Geography or the Roman Summer in San Lorenzo which combine the presence of institutions with activities of Public geography. The territory as a common good is such only if the community is the architect of its definition and recognizes the anthropological value of the space. In this direction, landscape education, strongly characterized on an emotional and cognitive level, contributes to implementing those reterritorialization processes which are the privileged tool of geography for the resolution of the impoverishment phenomena caused by situations of conflict and violence.

The countryside revenge. From the typical economy to the post-modern eating. – The increasing of the homologated processes of the production field and the food consumption are explanatory factors of a flowing back thought process that brings to consider food again in a stronger ethic and local key and environmental sustainability. In this evaluative scene of groceries traditional, handmade, biological, natural, zero kilometer, short supply chain and local categories, incorporating an additional quid to the industrial groceries, seem to answer with greater adequacy to the satisfaction of needs felt essential to the safety of traditions, nature and human wellbeing. Values for wich consumers are willing to pay an higher price with the purpose to respect them or incorporate them. As long as they are able to perceive their quality, identity and origin with an efficient story that bring them to market. A story that, in an increasing and careful measure, aims to bring out the intangible components of food that end up endowing it with an economic, nutritional, gustatory, health and identity surplus value.

Identity and geopolitics of Europe. The "fourth side" of the triangle Russia, United States, China

For a model of governance of Cultural Routes: Territorial Business Systems. The case study of the Via Francigena between Monti Prenestini ed Ernici. – Cultural routes and way are gradually assuming a leading role in territorial planning policies because on the one hand they are capable of responding to the criteria of environmental, social and economic sustainability and, on the other, of favoring an expansion of the tourist offer with a strong connotation identity. The study aims to support the hypothesis that a geographical approach by aggregates can represent the indispensable premise for the development of a governance model which, through the itinerary and the way, guarantees the implementation of actions aimed at enhancing and managing extended coherent territorial areas.

From “Italia dei barconi” to “Italia dei balconi”. National identity at the time of Covid-19. - This work is part of the debate known as «Media Geography» (Zimmermann, 2007; dell‟Agnese, 2011) and it aims to critically investi-gate the collective processes of identity narratives produced by the crisis developed by the Covid-19 emergency in Italy. These processes are identified in the media mainstream narratives of the sense of a common belonging and representation (Foucault, 1980; Schwartz, 2008). The survey takes into consideration the period February-April 2020 and it has identified a chronology of “Us”, structured as follows: “Us and Them”, “Us”, “Us and us”, through a semiotic and visual approach, a structure that encourages us to reflect on the contrast between local and global. Finally, the close link between politics and identity narration is highlighted: through the media, it tends to build images that activate and orient collective narration, confirming that «the ideological mobilization of identity concerns the images of identity rather than identity itself» (Pollice, 2005).

Covid-19 and Tourism. Sardinia: opportunities and tourist development perspectives. – The global emergency due to the spread of Covid-19 has resulted in restrictive measures for the movement of goods and people and in the stop of large production sectors, including tourism. The crisis that has affected the tourism industry worldwide also has negative consequences in regions such as Sardinia, already suffering from structural problems, among which there are seasonality and the prevailing incidence of the seaside model. In the Italian regional scenario, the island is among the least affected by the spread of the virus and, in view of a remodeling of its offer system starting from the implementation of organizational and governance structures and the strengthening of other identity tourism products capable of integrating different territories and sectors, could exploit this element to reposition itself as a smart and safe destination.

Semantic Web and Sentiment Analysis to Investigate the Territorial Image. Updates on the Salento Case. – Starting from the deep difference between cyberspace and cyberplace, this paper is developed in the second field of space: the cyberplace. In its recent conceptualization it is intended as the connection between offline and online actions. It is therefore the interstitial place that is generated by the encounter between virtual space and real space. The cyberplace reflects all the stages of the journey of a smart tourister and therefore becomes a container of numerous information relating to the tourist experience and destination in the tourist gaze 3.0, as Urry recalls. Online, from the tourist's gaze, new territorial narratives are spreading that arouse different reactions from the habitual users of the tourist destination who polarize in the opposite behaviors of strengthening the sense of identity or denial of the tourist narrative and reaction. The proposed empirical case is an update of the study conducted four years ago on the perception and online narration of the tourist destination Salento. The methodology used for the qualitative analysis of the semantic web, used in the first study updated, is the Sentiment Analysis which, after several experiments, proves to be increasingly useful for the study of the cyberplace and of the geographical narratives that spread in a-material squares (Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro, & Smyth, 1996; García, Gaines, Linaza, 2012; Grabner, Zanker, Fliedl, Fuchs, 2012; Hippner, Rentzmann, 2006; Kasper, Vela, 2011; Liu, 2011; Pang, Lee, 2008; Hu, Liu, 2004). Thanks to the proprietary App2Check sentiment analysis software, it is possible to understand the stories that spread on the Net and, above all, to investigate which new (though changeable and short-lived) feelings, images and identities are developing in Salento.

Abandonment, doubling, musealization: A Geography of the Grecanic Area from the 18^th century to today. – The Grecanic Area occupies the most remote strip of the Ionian coast in Calabria. Since the beginning of the contemporary age, it has undergone a deep and steady process of depopulation which has led the original villages to different destinies. In this article, we investigate the case of Pentedattilo, a small village which after a permanent abandonment is now moving along a path of musealization, and two cases of “doubling”: Bova-Bova Marina and Africo-Africo Nuovo. While the first case concerns two villages still extant and playing a significant role for the entire area, the latter is a case in which the ancient village has disappeared. These three cases give us a spectrum of types within which we can include most other villages in the area. Specific focuses are then dedicated to the development of communication routes; to the main aspect of the Area’s identity, the Greko language; and to its most prestigious economic production, the bergamot.

Minimum reflections on the responsibility of the hotel owners. – The two forms of liability of the hotelier, object of these brief considerations, integrate a special discipline with respect to the bailment contract, because of the conditions, the factual circumstances and the extent of the damage that the hotelier is liable for in case of damage to the hotel guest. The peculiarity of this liability regime emerges clearly in the legal limitation of the damage – the entity of which is determined by reference to the rental price of the accommodation –, in the typical causes of exemption from liability – such as that regarding the damage caused by guest’s deeds –, and in the function of the criminal complaint of the damage filed by the guest. The special discipline also extends to different cases, which present an identity of ratio with that of the hotelier.

Il mio articolo riguarda l’arte contemporanea. Partendo dal presupposto che le carte geografiche siano espressione di potere e strumenti per costruire le identità politiche e nazionali, la mia ricerca esamina lavori artistici che, in qualche modo vi corrispondono.
Analizzerò tra gli altri, alcuni lavori di Maja Bajevic, Mona Hatoum, Zarina Hashmi, in cui l’uso della mappa è espressione visuale delle pratiche discorsive del potere: questi lavori mettono in scena con diversi strumenti, il meccanismo che unisce rappresentazione geografica e potere politico, rendendo visibile la costruzione del simbolico. L’arte permette di discutere in modo critico quanto le esperienze e le rappresentazioni siano parte del complesso processo in divenire, nel tempo e nello spazio, costruito dal discorso egemonico e anti egemonico. L’arte contempora-nea diventa per me strumento di analisi della relazione tra diversi tipi di rappresentazione e la costruzione del potere.

The European Mediterranean region. Management and valorization of landscape transformations. – If on the one hand, many Mediterranean landscapes show the signs of an upset of ecological equilibrium and of a loss of identity-making peculiarities, on the other hand we see a renewed social demand, centered on the cultural, social and environmental values of each landscape, which induces to a reconsideration of politics as well. Hence, we have an increasing of regulative documents, agreements, projects and measures about all the different territorial scales. The main objective of this work is to analyze some of these planning proposals and programmatic documents which have been produced in Europe, to discover sustainable ways of territorial regeneration. The leading thread of this paper consists in investigating the meaning and value assumed by some instruments within a territorial planning directed towards innovation and collaborative planning.