The case study of Bitti (Sardinia): Risk perception and local best practices. – In alignment with Goal 13 of the UN 2030 Agenda, strengthening risk awareness within local communities can provide a framework for effective citizenship in managing extreme weather and climate events. In Sardinia, the community of Bitti (an inland area in the province of Nuoro, northeastern Sardinia) experienced a devastating flood in 2020. In response, local institutions and the community demonstrated resilience and implemented sound institutional practices. Following a field survey initiated through meetings with local authorities, this work presents the results of research aimed at understanding the risk perception among the municipality’s population. This insight aims to support the future implementation of participatory processes and citizen science tools designed to foster the development of communities resilient to meteorological disasters.

Listening to the nights of Fez a fragmentary narrative. – In how many ways can one listen to a city – or rather the city – that excludes the noise of traffic while preserving the ancestral channelling and sonic configurations of its alleys and of materials belonging to a time discreet yet not immobile? The soundscape of the medina of Fez emerges not only as a visual space, but as a stratified acoustic landscape, oscillating between public, discreet, and sheltered spaces on the one hand, and private, reverberant, and communal ones on the other. The calls to prayer from the minarets, the flight of storks, and both human and non-human voices contribute to the construction of a sonic geography that defines urban spatiality. Architecture itself functions as an acoustic device that amplifies, attenuates, or trans-forms sounds, making Fez one of the most significant “cities of sound” in the world. Nighttime, in particular, discloses the sonic intimacy of the me-dina, transforming it into a natural conservatory of phonetic effects—an intangible heritage belonging not only to history, but also to the daily practices and sensory perceptions of its inhabitants

“No More Nature?”. An Ecocritical Theatre and Drama-Based Research Experience. – The paper presents a site-specific, theatre and drama-based research experience exploring social perceptions of biodiversity loss. Grounded in ecocritical geography, the participatory process activated post-anthropocentric relational practices, highlighting the potential of performative methods in geographical research and in imagining multispecies coexistence.

Proximity tourism. The perception of locations as rediscovery and development of local destinations. – The Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally reshaped the concept of mobility across the globe. People had to rethink their own lives and above all their usual mobility spaces. After restrictions, people could move to nearby rediscovering a proximity tourism which is characterized by an increased emphasis on local and regional experiences. It reflects a desire for safer, more sustainable, and easily accessible travel options, as tourists prioritize health concerns, lower carbon footprints, and less crowded environments. In this article we are going to understand how some locations have been changed due to pandemic and which geographical transformation have experienced.

From Mega Events to city’s touristification: dilemmas of Genoa’s renewed cultural capital. – The Mega Events that Genoa (Liguria, Italy) hosted between 1990 and 2004 (Expo ’92, 2001 G8 summit, European Capital of Culture 2004) have shifted the urban change and economic transition of the city towards cultural tourism, inducing administrators in the past two decades to organise a series of periodic minor events in order to maintain this trend. In this article we analyse the statistical data that demonstrate these changes and present the results of a survey disseminated to 522 citizens and users of the Liguria Region with the aim of understanding the locals’ perception about the role of such events in catalysing urban transformation and about the risks or opportunities related to the touristification of Genoa. The results emphasise the enduring gap between the “long timescales” of urban transformations and their perception, identifying the main drivers of these transformations.

Remote, inner, left behind? The actors, social infrastructures and multivelevel governance of remote habitability. – This paper focuses on the assemblage of material and immaterial infrastructures, actors and multilevel policies that enhance (or impair) what we define as “remote habitability” in left-behind, remote areas. Applying the ethnographic sensitivity urged by Tomaney et al. (2024) for understanding in-depth the “making, unmaking and remaking” of contested social infrastructures in left-behind places, we present theoretical reflections and empirical evidence that draw upon a multisite fieldwork in the municipalities that compose the “Gran Sasso-Valle Subequana” subgroup within the Italian “National Strategy for Inner Areas” national policy framework (SNAI). The archival research, semi-structured inter-views and empirical observations that engaged institutional and non-institutional actors let emerge patterns of action, discourse and perception of social infrastructures and resources that are necessary for grappling with the identification and conceptualization of “remote habitability”.

The geography of the Divine Comedy: some remarks. – The geography of the Divine Comedy, although it is supplied with a dimension of proximity, defines a space basically symbolic which is by analogy to temporal synchrony, here action and space merge into a single reality that give substance to the Theatrum.
Dante’s sources of knowledge and geographical perception can be traced back to the observation of the “man of culture” and to his wanderings as exiled as well as to an apparatus of readings typical of the Florentine cul-ture on the threshold of Humanism.

Why Geography? – This paper underlines the great importance that geographical data have in Dante’s Comedy: the poem is entirely interwoven with references to the space of the earth, in a continuous relationship between the imagination of the places of the otherworld and the perception and geographical projection of the real world. The author considers and distinguishes in this regard three perspectives of study: a historical-philological line, a structural line, an epistemological-hermeneutic line; and shows how today the focus on Dante’s geography directly calls into question the urgency of the environmental question.

Landascape of Decay. Landscape of the Camorra: Characters, Perceptions and Storytelling. – For a reading of the landscapes of the Camorra, the peculiarities of a territorial nature should be analyzed: economic, urban planning, social, criminal and narrational of these particolar landscape scenarios of degradation. By practicing a critical analysis of the relationships that are established between organized crime and the landscape. In its physical forms and in those of individual and community life. The Camorra landscape is produced by a system of community relations achieved by a range of widespread illegal attitudes and behaviors, converging in actions of laceration of the civil fabric. The perception of this set of negative values is a fundamental component of the generation and perpetuation of this landscape. The individuals and communities of those territories have the perennial cogency of an "underlying" landscape present to their sensorial and cultural perception, based on disvalues distorting every action and behavior, therefore every feeling of them. The territory, its use and its governance, is strongly characterized by uses, practices, meanings and a particular storytelling. Made up of values charged with social and criminal negativity, but also fully perceived by the communities. Communities are forced to undergo this particular territorial connotation, which becomes fundamental in the emergence of this landscape of organized crime.

The garden as a projection of a political space. – The creation of a garden repre-sents the effort to create, in a defined space, a project that refers to client in its representation. This element, which is the basis of his creation, suf-fers from a basic ambiguity. On the one hand the garden is definitely oriented towards his personality, on the other hand it is still an open space, natural and therefore usable and available.
These two elements become particularly evident in those gardens that have the explicit function of concretely representing their political character and therefore oriented towards establishing a strong relationship between the client and those who frequent it.
The example of the garden of Versailles represents the complete identifi-cation between the sovereign and his garden, providing many elements to understand how the perception of the park is a key element of Louis XIV’s own political project.

The hydrogeological risk in Calabria in the relocation of Cavallerizzo (Northern Calabria, Italy). – In Italy, there are many areas in hydrogeological instability and many others show clear signs that, added to neglect, poor maintenance, absence of maintenance works and unsustainable territorialization processes, turn into critical issues. Risk mitigation interventions vary depending on the exposure, but even more so on the availability of resources and the perception of risk by the communities involved. About one third of the population lives in these areas with a high hydro-geological risk, which see the relocation of settlements with the consequent abandonment of unstable historical centers among the most complex and controversial interventions. The case study concerns the relocation of the Cavallerizzo di Cerzeto hamlet in Calabria, affected by a deep gravitational movement in the area of more recent urbanization and chosen as it was rebuilt with the urban structure and neighborhood relations of the old village as a settlement for the minority ethnic-linguistic arbëreshe. 

Perception and communication in the time of Covid-19

Shipwreck with Spectator: Epidemics and Society in the Ancient World. – Starting from the meaning of the Greek word epidemia, the paper highlights its topographical and social connotation (“stay at home, stay in a city”), from Homer to Hippocrates. It then moves on to scrutinize some of the most impactful epidemic events in ancient Greece and Rome, focusing on their social and political consequences, on the geographic spread and the medical features. These events are the Athenian plague of 431 BCE, the epidemic cough of Perinthos as told by Hippocrates, and the Antoninian plague in Rome around 166 CE; the paper also recalls the so-called plague of Justinian, whose fateful aftermath has been often related to the end of the Roman empire. A possible connection is also discussed between the Antoninian plague in Rome and a very similar epidemics taking place in the same years in China, at a time when the first direct contacts between the two empires were established. Eventually, a reflec-tion upon the different perceptions of an epidemics is offered.

 

Safe and non-safe space: an investigation on new dwelling strategies in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. – The experience of Covid-19 gave us the need to rethink organisational methods of contemporary society, particularly public and domestic spaces. Our research used the pandemic struggle to examine current ways of looking at the safe and unsafe, entailing new practises of social action.
This research was structured in two different stages. First we investigated a series of behaviours and perceptions within public and domestic spaces. Second we examined the strategies through which the subjects reorient the spaces and define new habitus and practices of dwelling. In both cases we focused on hygiene procedures and alternative measures undertaken to diminish the risk of contagion.
The case studies are grouped by three different ranges of contagion in northern, central and southern Italy. They are discussed with reference to theoretical and methodological debates within social geography and cultural anthropology.

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.

The Great War of Geography. – The First World War has been considered a turning point in the evolution of Italian geography. Following an unusual perspective this paper does not focus on the internal events of the discipline, but especially presents the implications of the very political and social transformations on it. Significant factors of the analyzed decisive historical period are therefore highlighted: the politicization of the discipline, the self-perception geographers had of their role, their relationship with ruling classes and with the public.

Southern Italy and Euro-Mediterranean development. Cultural Routes for a new territorial vision – Cultural routes have assumed, for our country and especially for the South, a particularly important value and are becoming nowadays ever more instrument and opportunities for tourism innovation. The perception is that we are at the gates of a new historical phase in which a substantial reflection on new forms of enjoyment of territories contrasts with the aggression of the great cultural heritage.
To the south and along the trajectories of cultural and historical itineraries, the common Euro-Mediterranean root of crossed territories and the ties between communities deserve a different consideration, new forms of integrated tourism and a different narrative ability.
For these reasons an organic reflection on the prospects of territorial development, starting from the routes that run through and give life to the Southern Italy and Mediterranean tourist realities, erroneously defined minor, becomes particularly important nowadays, and probably one of the concrete sources of feasible sustainable development.

Cross-Border Cooperation across Sicily and Tunisia: experiences and prospects. – The article presents the main results of a field research conducted between 2012 and 2013 on the Italy-Tunisia border, aimed at investigating regional development options through policies and practices of cross-border cooperation. Starting from the specific context of the Italy-Tunisia border, the article presents the main aims, achievements, limits and prospects for cross-border cooperation across the channel of Sicily, also in light of the perceptions and expectations of local private and public stakeholders. The priorities to be addressed at different scales in order to improve the impact of the cooperation between Sicily and Tunisia include, in our opinion, the support to democratization in Tunisia and to the local civil society; to pay attention to the social as well as the economic aspects of cooperation; to ensure to local actors both political and financial support; to improve the cross-border cooperation instrument through a better targeting; the setting of a coherent multilevel political framework for addressing each of these issues effectively.