Environmental metaphors in the lyrics of contemporary Italian songs. – Music, understood as an expressive form of popular culture, can become a moment for artists to reflect and become aware of current issues and a tool for the production and dissemination of environmental discourses. In a hybrid field between environmental, cultural, and media geographies, this contribution analyses the lyrics of 20 recent Italian songs dedicated to the defence of the planet. The aim is exploring how musical texts has represented the intricate relationship between the environment and human beings, particularly using metaphors. The research reveals that musical lyrics under examination have associated nature and the Earth with various scientific or religious concepts, but also with multiple images of women, reproducing environmental discourses centred on anthropocentric or patriarchal ideologies.

Photographic representation of biodiversity and countercurrent aesthetics of marine landscapes. – Questioning the role of images in the communication and valorization of biodiversity, as well as in the constitution of cultural geographic imaginaries and environmental sensibilities, this paper focuses on the aesthetics of marine landscapes in some contemporary artistic and activist practices. More specifically, it investigates the function of photography in the construction and deconstruction of stereotypes related to coastal areas and islands (between artistic traditions and tourist imaginaries), thus in the representation of issues related to biodiversity. Contrary to approaches that tend to show marine landscapes exclusively as picturesque or sublime sceneries, projects such as Else, All Will Be Still (Ravi Agarwal, 2013-2015), After the Storm (Amy Balkin, 2016), The Shape of Water Vanishes in Water (Marina Caneve, 2018) and Invisible – Paysages productifs (Nicolas Floc’h, 2018-2020), seek to express the environmental, social and economic inequalities aggravated by climate change and its consequences on marine biodiversity.

The new opportunities offered by immersive and inclusive technologies to represent and rediscover the complex relationship between human communities and water resources. – In order to know, represent and interpret the complex relationship between water landscapes and human communities the new technologies (immersive cartography, three-dimensional web, augmented reality, 3D environments) represent extraordinary and functional tools both for research and for territorial information and promotion actions in terms of tourism. Evidence of this is the project “Tourist Itineraries to Discover the Waters of Italy”, conceived and promoted by the GECOAGRI LANDITALY Interuniversity Research Group Association and financed by ACEA, aimed at promoting a process of water resource enhancement in the dimension of environmental, economic and social sustainability. The authors through some exemplifications and using a methodology of operational analysis, characterized by new syntaxes, reconstruct with the help of augmented reality and immersive technologies, as well as the canonical geocartographic and documentary sources, the material and immaterial dimension of the water resource in the Conca reatina, Umbilicus Italiae, where the sociocultural dynamics underlying the relationship between water and population, narrate experiences of vulnerability and development, participation and conflict, protection and threat. Through 10 ten interactive and implementable totem-stations, it is possible to embark on an inclusive and participatory journey that allows people to explore even inaccessible places. Not only video and audio, historical and thematic cartographies, photos and three-dimensional images, but also drone shots from which to observe from above what nature and culture have achieved and, if necessary, to land in particular places reconstructed through augmented reality that allows one to observe them as they were and as they are today, making clear the processes of transformation of which signs and sedimentations remain in the landscape palimpsest.

From the European Capital to the Italian Capital of Culture. Reflections on the sidelines of Procida 2022 on events, narratives, images. – The contribution focuses on the “Capital of Culture” cross-referencing the characteristics, in terms of discourses and governance, assumed by the event – in its different declination at the European and Italian scale – with the new instances developed for tourist attraction and city branding’s goals. The two events will be explored with reference to the designated Italian cities, from the evolution of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) program to the invention of the Italian Capital of Culture (ICoC) initiative. The focus on the impact of ICoC, on the sidelines of Procida 2022, will allow us to reflect on the dynamics and contradictions produced by the cultural event on a tourist location already known for literary and cinematographic representations, in order to grasp the interrelations between the event and the new narratives and images conveyed.

Landscape and proximity fruition in the Euganean Hills context: reflections from an educational experience. – Tourism-recreational practices are often framed through dichotomous concepts such as near/far, familiar/unfamiliar, tourist/local, and everyday/exotic. With this awareness, we proposed a didactic laboratory within the Master’s degree program in Landscape Science at the University of Padua to address the following research question: What role does the experience of landscape play in reconsidering these dichotomous approaches? We analysed the Euganean Hills area in the Padua province exploring four specific contexts, two historical houses and two museums, where the relationship with the landscape is defined by practices of proximity and specific connections with natural and cultural heritage values. The research was based on desk analysis of demographic and tourism data, strategic and promotional documents, visits and interviews. Dialogue with local operators, their perspectives on local communities and the direct immersion in the landscape unveiled the multiple ways in which the Euganean landscape is understood and promoted for leisure purposes. What emerged is the plurality of discourses and images, places and initiatives, often co-created ‘from below’, that define and redefine the landscape. Tracing the variety of proximity visits, experienced similarly by residents and tourists through an interesting hybridisation process mixing roles, motivations and space sharing, allows to overcome dichotomies and open up new spaces for reflection and local planning.

Remote sensing methods for burnout mapping and burn severity evaluation. The case of Trieste and Gorizia karst area in the summer of 2022. – Human beings are the principal agents of forest fires. In Friuli Venezia Giulia more than 90% of fires are of arson origin although the fire development and impact depend on land cover and weather conditions. During the second half of 2022, a serious fire broke out in Doberdò del Lago and blazed for a good ten days in a transnational karst area among Trieste, Gorizia and Sezana. During the fire, over 4000 hectares of forest went up in smoke. This paper shows the use of Remote Sensing methodology in a GIS environment to measure the effects of the fire, i.e. to map the burnt area. The 2022 event has been assessed by elaborating some pre and post fire ESA Sentinel 2 imagery (Copernicus project). The authors mapped the burnt areas and compared the result with the official mapping, surveyed in the field by the public authorities. They also made a spatial evaluation

The G7 at Borgo Egnazia. Geopolitics and the Imagery of Italy in the World

Dantesque Geography as a genre of the Italian geography between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. – In Italian geography between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed the “dantesque geography” which appears to be not a mere research topic, but a real genre that shared to characterize the history of the discipline in that period. It is circumscribed nearly by the two sixth centenaries of the Dante’s birth and death or more precisely between the Italian unification and the coming of fascism. The essay reconstruct its origin and development from Covino (1865) to Revelli (1922). The “dantesque geography” dealt with the Dante’s cosmology, geographical and cartographical knowledges, also for the contributions, among others, of Dalla Vedova, Bertacchi, Mori, Magnaghi. Its main purpose, however, is to shape an image of Italy as a natural and linguistic region that present itself as a prophecy and historical legitimation of contemporary Italy and its territorial aspirations and so it produced also some maps of “dantesque Italy”. The theme of the Italian boundaries according Dante, particularly the northeastern border, is therefore central.

Literaly journey in the Tuscia of Divine Comedy. – In the field of Odeporic geography, many scholars have commented on the theme of the journey linked to the name of Dante Alighieri (Cavalieri, 2015; Ferroni, 2015) and as Ferroni (2015) claims we might consider conferring on Dante the competence of geographer. In fact, it is sufficient to read the descriptions of the various Italian places (which he directly or indirectly knows) and their physical-geographical aspects to understand, through a real journey in the Dantesque era, the characteristics of the landscape within which the Comedy is narrated. Through an in-depth reading of the cantos, the goal of this paper is to propose a Dantean itinerary in Tuscia, tracing places, symbols and images. The methodological analysis also included an online survey to verify the existence of similar proposals and a search to examine the feasibility of the itinerary. To achieve this result, ISTAT data (2019-2021) on the tourist movement in the area were also collected. The stages of the proposed itinerary, therefore, concern the historic center of Viterbo and the Urban Park of Bullicame, Bolsena and Bagnoregio.

Natural images of Dante’s underworld. – Dante Alighieri’s ability to represent the reality of the afterlife is known. The effectiveness of this representation is entrusted by the author to the use of similitudes. The main goal of this research is to underline how the similitudes used by Dante refer mostly to the natural world and how the author constructs the infernal geography through physical and concrete data of an experiential world to which every man can refer to. This attitude of Dante to “speak in images” (visibil parlare), then, is investigated as the main cause that has allowed and inspired so many successive transcodes from literature to the visual arts.

Marginal places and resistance in the filmography of Djibril Diop Mambéty. – The filmography of Djibril Diop Mambéty allows reflection on the manner in which urban Senegal takes part in the narrative through a form of decolonial representation. The director focuses on the peripheries of Dakar, a territory marked by colonialism. As the camera explores the urban environment, images and sound become instruments with which to control heterotopic spaces. By redirecting power through a painful negotiation between colonial legacy and a new, deviant focus, these tools show the irreducible otherness of places within the filmic discourse. Mambéty’s critical gaze is also manifested through his protagonists, who belong to a human universe that remains on the fringes of society. These are subaltern figures who, through their sense of se débrouiller, implement practices of resistance within a social and territorial framework permeat-ed by the informal economy.

Inside the Margins and Marginality: (Condi-)Visions and Scientific-Artistic Practices in Suburban Contexts. – The contribution aims at analysing areas which, due to characteristics of housing discomfort, are labelled as marginal spaces of the city. After exploring the concepts of margin and marginality with reference to two areas in the eastern suburb of Naples, analysed as urban fragments in a new centre-periphery relationship, the paper focuses on a project recently developed intersecting creative art practices and geographic research. The results of site-specific experiences – conducted by involving inhabitants, scholars and artists-in-residence in on-site workshops and theatre works – have contributed to a co-construction of a new knowledge of places. Aware of the methodological difficulties and limita-tions underlying geographic-artistic collaborations, starting from sites, and integrating everyday narratives and images has allowed to enter inside the margins, trying to contribute exploring the creative potential of the fragments beyond the labels of territorial and symbolic marginality.

Sicani-telling: small stories from Sicily’s margins. – This article tells some stories from the Sicani inner area, in Sicily. Drawing on the considerable debate that in recent years – particularly after the National Strategy for Inner Areas, launched in 2012 – has flourished, this article aims to contribute to the deconstruction of the aestheticizing visions that invest these territories. In particular, the narcotized image of the bourg is critically considered: a discursive and political tendency that underlies selective and pacified imaginaries. Following the idea that small stories produce the world, the article describes some narratives collected during an experiential guided tour through walking research methods. This storytelling is analyzed asking what discourse is produced on these marginal places. As a result, the small stories are a mode of the geographic discourse: a method in doing geography with an embodied and affective approach.

Animal cities. Mediated experiences and collective narratives for unnatural geography of the wild. – The clear separation – conceptual, ethical, spatial – between man and wildlife (Whatmore, 2002) remains to this day one of the most fascinating topics of reflection around our relationship with the environment. The cultural history of the wild, especially in its North American roots, hinges on the preservation of territories marked by the absence of appreciable anthropic traces, an exotic, ahistorical nature, in open contrast to urban and peri-urban areas, understood in an Enlightenment sense as spaces of civilization, themselves purged of the presence of the non-human. A binary biogeography that unequivocally identifies the right space for the human, placed at the centre, and the non-human, at the margin. Yet, this stark contrast has been brought to the centre of both scientific debate and public interest, especially during the historic 2020 lockdown, when images and multimedia content have extensively documented the fragility of this strict division of space. Starting from a reconstruction of contemporary mass media discourse, the contribution, therefore, aims to document how the emergence and circulation of grand narratives such as that of ‘nature spaces’ or the ‘awakening of nature’ can reveal epistemological dynamics common to different socio-economic contexts, but also substantially different responses to the various phenomenologies of the wild. The very notion of the margin as a dividing border between man and nature is discussed in relation to the descriptions and representations mobilized by newspapers and social media, to explore the possibilities and potentialities of a reunion between human and non-human, even in non-domesticated forms, in anthropized environments such as those of cities.

Geopolitics of pandemic: soft and hard power as reading keys. - The Covid 19
pandemic is one of the hardest challenge of the last century. With its
m edical emergency, Covid 19 has created a lot of changes in the
international relationships and in the geopolitical equilibrium. In this
paper, we are attempting to show and analyze global governments’
behavior against the pandemic through the use of both h ard and soft
power. We’ll see, particularly, Chinese and American government’s use of
hard and soft power. Then we’ll examine how European Union deal with
this global emergency. Each nation has carried on different diplomatic strategies to face the pandemic and to promote is own international image. Hard and soft power, in this sense, will be useful also to implement the social and economic policies and to make them effective in the post pandemic phase.

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).

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.