Living in Valbrevenna Today: Urban-Mountain Dynamics within the Greater Genoa. – The concept of “metropolitan mountain”, which has recently gained significant traction in academic discussions, encourages the reflection on the relationship between center and periphery, aiming to transcend traditional oppositions between metropolitan and mountain areas. Moving away from the city, the territorial processes reveal increasingly distinct dynamics that may offer valuable insights into the potential of these mountainous regions within the metropolitan context. In this article, the municipality of Valbrevenna (in the Metropolitan City of Genoa) is studied to explore the territorial re-configurations of cotemporary lives, moving beyond dichotomous perspectives to embrace a nuanced view of the social, economic, and demographic complexities that define this territory. Based on the results of extensive qual-itative field research, this study offers contextualized reflections aimed at stimulating further discussion on the specific configurations of a “metropolitan mountain” within the Genoa area also for what concerns the challenges offered by the climate changes.

Post-Covid tourism: an opportunity for renewal or a return to mass flows? The case of the metropolitan city of Genoa. – During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the difficulty of international travel has revived proximity tourism in Italian regions, with some locations that have regained the interest of the domestic catchment area with regard to outdoor activities. With the aim of assessing market changes for this tourism segment within the metropolitan city of Genoa and in order to overcome the difficulties caused by gaps in the numerical data, this contribution presents the results of a questionnaire proposed to various workers in the sector (hiking/tourist guides, bloggers/instagrammers, managers of accommodation facilities and operators of outdoor tourism companies), combined with the analysis of official data on tourist movement. The results demonstrate a temporary increase of proximity tourism during the pandemic, while data on the following years (2022-2023) suggest a return to pre-pandemic habits.

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.

Between art, culture and landscape. Three Famous cemeteries in Paris. – Along the centuries, a sort of pilgrimage to cemeteries, sometimes to very far ones, took place, as in the famous example of the travel of the poet Caius Va-lerius Catullus to the tomb of his brother.
On the contrary, in the 19th century the fashion to visit outstanding sepulchres, renowned for artistic or cultural purposes, emerged. The example of the cemetery of Genoa-Staglieno is well known, and the Novodèviciy monastery in Moscow was frequented, secretly and if possible, even under the Soviet power.
A recent statistic about the most visited graveyards worldwide reveals that, out of 417 places considered, 192 are Italians, lying in many regions: 55% of the total, while at the 2nd place is Spain with 29 places and 8,3% of the total.
In Paris this type of tourism reaches, above all, that of Père-Lachaise, and then that of Montparnasse and that of Montmartre.

Dynamics of the urban forest. The case of Nervi and Sant’Ilario (Genoa). – The text was developed within the PRIN project “Sylva – Ripensare la selva” and aims to analyze some landscape and environmental impacts of the rewilding process that took place in the Nervi valley. Nervi and Sant’Ilario today represent one of the “greenest” areas of the municipality of Genoa. In the past, these localities, favored by a particularly mild microclimate, were however widely exploited for agriculture on terraces and pastoralism. The abandonment process that began in the second half of the twentieth century favored the advance of the forest, interrupted only by the repeated fires that hit the valley. These phenomena have also accentuated the susceptibility to instability of the slopes, demonstrating that reforestation processes are not always positive.

 

New spatialities at the time of Covid-19: the case of Genoa. – The Covid-19 epidemic has had a significant impact on Liguria’s and Genoa’s population in terms of infections rate and associated fatalities, both due to the links with other regions of Northern Italy and the old population. Following national lockdown measurements, the population had to face dramatic changes in habits and everyday life. The paper looks at the impact that the lockdown measurements had on spatiality and everyday life in Genoa’s neighbourhoods. A survey has been carried out among a representa-tive sample of Genoa’s population. The results are analysed also in terms of their spatial distribution, showing the different impact that the lockdown measurements had in the city’s neighbourhoods.