Mountain Tourism and Climate Change: What Are the Future Prospects? – In the collective imagination, when one speaks of a mountain tourist destination, the reference is typically to iconic places, especially associated with the winter season and the so-called “settimana bianca” (winter holiday week). Places like Courmayeur or Cortina d’Ampezzo have represented, and have been portrayed in films as well, a constant presence in the world of mountain tourism. The first major setback occurred with the Covid-19 pandemic in recent years, which changed the concept of travel and mobility as we had known it. In particular, the halt to national and international connections caused not only economic damage across the entire tourism sector but, more importantly, created a widespread fear of being together in crowded and enclosed spaces. This led people to rethink and reprogram their lives and their mobility habits, triggering - once it became possible to leave their places of residence - a timid yet urgent desire to be outdoors, to walk in the woods, visit beaches, and explore city centers where they could satisfy the longing that had built up over nearly two years of complete travel lockdown. This shift resulted in an exponential increase in visits to nearby locations at the provincial and regional levels, leading to a renewed appreciation for neighboring areas, as well as small villages and mountain towns. These places, in turn, had to adapt to welcome an increasing number of unexpected and unanticipated tourists. Adding to this scenario is climate change, which is severely challenging the operators of mountain facilities and accommodations. The seasons no longer follow their natural rhythm, and instead, we are witnessing increasingly unpredictable and violent weather events. This article will explore how certain mountain locations are confronting these emergencies and what changes they are likely to undergo in terms of tourism in the near future.

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.

Nature, landscapes and sport. One hundred years of cycling with the Giro d’Italia. – The paper aims to examine the impact of the Giro d’Italia event, analyzing the importance of the bicycle both as a sporting, amateur, and tourist activity, and as a form of sustainable mobility that contributes to the ecological transition. The applied qualitative methodology focuses on the significance of documentary analysis, but primarily on the study of narratives in the promotional media of the event. The analytical tool, Nvivo12 software, was utilized. The green projects associated with the Giro d’Italia are designed to raise awareness and promote sustainability, demonstrating that sport is a lever of considerable value. However, there is likely a need for greater emphasis and dissemination of these narratives.

Territorialization practices in the L’Aquila Apennines: transhumance, emigration and tourism. – The paper discusses the interconnected human and animal flows that have characterized the mobility in the high lands of L’Aquila province since the unification of Italy, when flocks and shepherds crossed their paths with emigrants, while tourists began to populate the mountains with different purposes, up to the present day, when the Abruzzo mountains are experiencing new opportunities to enroot the population and promote the territorial revitalization. Subsequently, the socio-spatial dynamics of some food productions of the southern slope of the Gran Sasso d’Italia connected to the practice of Transhumance are presented: secondary products of the pastoral economy of the past, mainly connected to the wool trade, which currently play a central role in creating employment opportunities of small local communities, with important repercussions also in the redefinition of tourist trajectories.

The border as operational space: ‘black spaces’ and border infrastructures. – How can one make sense of territorial borders in a context characterized by increasingly dislocated and widespread migration and border management policies? What policies emerge from the intersection between different types of mobility? And what contribution can geography make to understanding these intersections? Adopting a terminology of borders-as-infrastructures, this essay promotes a topological perspective that focuses on the productive tensions inherent in the very functioning and spatial reach of borders. With a focus on the territorial control mechanisms adopted to channel and filter mobile agricultural labour in the region of Basilicata in 2014-2019, the article moves beyond an understanding of borders as mere territorial divisions or technological devices. The argument advanced here is that border infrastructures involve significant socio-material entanglements – interactions between physical and social forces – that continue to channel and direct our relationship with the territorial state.

The relational space of transhumance: practices, values, visions. – In the past few decades, the study of transhumance has shifted from documenting a declining practice to adopting a more comprehensive approach, integrating heritage studies, political ecology, and the analysis of territorial resignification dynamics. This monographic issue aims to emphasize an articulated and relational perspective on the phenomenon. By using both old and new transhumance practices as a foundation for exploring forms of territoriality, the focus lies on the interplay between mobility and the creation of patrimonial value, cultural landscapes, and governance processes. The central question addressed is whether an operational approach to transhumance routes can effectively reconnect the past and the future. The contents of the volume are organized to prioritize research objectives, with contributions concentrating on the knowledge and patrimonialization of transhumance areas at risk of abandonment, ultimately aiming to preserve their ecological, biological, and cultural values.

Informal Work: Proposing a Dialogue between Development Studies and Labour Geography. The Case of East and Southeast Asia. – The paper brings into dialogue selected streams of critical analysis on the ILO concept of informal labour – especially from the fields of political economy and development studies – with some major insights on labour and its transformations from labour geography. Focusing on the case of East and Southeast Asia, and resorting to the multiscalar notion of “labour regime”, the pa-per details crucial actors and devices that underlie specific ways of organ-izing work, its exploitation – and its informalization – in key export industries such as garment and electronics. More specifically, informalization processes are analyzed at the intersection between international capital mobility, the state and labor organizations, and in relation to the capacity of international capital to exploit pre-existing context-specific differentials, especially along the gender and rural-urban axes. Overall, the paper discloses key labour dynamics characterizing pivotal areas of the so-called “global factory”, while more generally highlighting the co-constitutive role that spatial, territorial and scalar configurations play in the processes of labour informalisation.

Emerging urban mobility. Critical evaluation of micromobility, e-bikes and e-scooters, between individuality, public and private. – In recent years, shared mobility has grown in many cities around the world. The term micromobility was coined to refer to low-speed shared vehicles like bicycles and scooter (moped and kick-style) that have recently drawn more attention. It offers a flexible transport option capable of avoiding road congestion encouraging intermodality. This paper aims to identify the main factors that individuals affect to adopt electric e-micromobility. Following systematic literature, we observed the reported influence of several functional and non-functional factors over the decision on whether to use an e-micromobility mode of transport in Italian cities. Cities have to provide better conditions for walking, cycling and emerging micromobilities and thereby at the same time contribute to a more sustainable and equitable urban transport system.

Aviation, airports and territory. – Transport geography deals with the movement of freight, people and information, seeking to link the spatial constraints and attributes with the origin, destination, extent, nature and purpose of movements
Within this view, the paper analyses the cross-relationships between territories and transport, identifying how transports influence territories.
In this paper, particular attention is paid to aviation, an element that contributes to shaping interactions in geographical spaces.
Methodologically, the first part highlights the development and charac-teristics of air transport, emphasizing the relationship between transport and economic systems.
Then the analysis focuses on the topic of accessibility and airport struc-tures, outlining the distinctive features that characterize transport, i.e. di- stances and territories, since the purpose of transport is to overcome space, which is limited by human and physical constraints such as dis-tance, time, administrative divisions and territory.

The role of policies for the activation of human capital and territorial mobility in con-trasting skilled youth emigration. – This study aims to investigate the role of local human capital activation policies and the value of territorial mobili-ty to contrast the phenomenon of qualified youth emigration. A phe-nomenon that has regained momentum in Italy in the last decade.
This study examines complex initiatives implemented by Italian regions and local authorities (especially Torno Subito by the Lazio Region and other programmes such as Ritorno al futuro by the Puglia Region and Master and Back by the Sardinia Region) that can serve as a model for national and European policy makers. Programmes that can help to counter skilled emigration and support the "right to stay" of a generation of skilled young people who, more than others, suffer from job insecuri-ty and a growing risk of marginalisation.

The experienced space between mobility and Covid-19 restrictions. – If it is true that lived space represents our becoming and our being individual in our society, any variation on it, it implicates for the human race a physical, mental and relational disturbance. Human being lives in his territory and territory is modeled, for better or for worse, by human being. Global events, such as pandemics, force human being to confront himself with an enemy more and more underhand, able to undermine his certainties, gained until today.
Daily mobility has to be reconsidered in a new way; principles, for example, as The Schengen Agreement, is put to the test, causing a block in every region, and calling into doubt the worth of the same principle.
Which scenarios shall we face at the end of this pandemic? How is human being going to take on global future events? And what restrictions are adaptable to our freedom and democracy? Are we ready to face them?

Redefine tourism model. Reflection: critical issues emerged during Covid-19. – The new emergency we are facing with current spread of coronavirus imposes restrictions in everyday life and mobility across different territories and countries; we are globally compelled to face mutual problems, regardless of unilateral positions and this is giving strength to globalization just when a crisis of the globalized world model seemed to be consolidat-ing. Even modern tourism in the pre-pandemic economic and political situation was building a path of progressive quantitative growth and showing positive signs even in the most difficult moments of the recent international economic crisis. However, global tourism is now displaying an overall weakness as never happened in the pasts and it is starting featuring negative data and forecasts showing how this emergency is affecting a substantial portion of the Italian economy, which has reached 13,2% of GDP in 2018 with subsequent significant meaning also in terms of employment. Although it is difficult to foresee future tourism developments, this paper wants to suggest a reflection on the possible scenarios that could be configured out in the medium term, starting from considerations on the role that the national corporate system in tourism has played within the Italian supply chain.

In this paper we suggest that, to approach the actual urban configurations, we are in need of new geographies. To critically understand the production of socio natural space we propose two methods: Planetary Urbanization and World Ecology. Consistent with the ongoing debate in Urban Political Ecology, we approach the Covid-19 pandemic as a result of the ecological crisis which is, as we show, an urban crisis. In order to immagine new methods of living with and
within nature, we suggest to go beyond the normative dichotomies developed by the Capitalistic culture. Considering this problem, we approac h to the urbanization as a multiscalar and uneven process, with a specific attention on public spaces (common), mobility (daily or wide ranging) and the relationship between infrastructures and nature (the Mapuche case).

The Covid-19 pandemic within an inner area of Campania: peripherality, density and virus diffusion in the province of Avellino. – In Italy the Covid-19 emergency hit some of the territories crossed by the thickest commercial networks and the intense flows of human mobility
The paper aims to reason on the factors of territorial vulnerability that may have facilitated the spread of the virus, trying to formulate a first hypothesis about the low density settlement structure has protected the more peripheral communities of the inner areas. Starting from the epidemiological data in an inner province of Campania - that of Avellino - the analysis will try to give a first possible framework of the relationship between the degree of peripherality from the service poles, population density and virus diffusion.

Geographies of Covid-19. – A first analysis of the scenario occurred as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic puts in evidence the changes in the way people deal with the spatial-time dimension, in the human rela-tions and in the consequent socio-territorial configurations.
Since the first moments of the pandemic geography gave an important contribution in the study of the phenomenon and in the analysis of its territorial consequences, useful to elaborate solutions from the global to the local scales.
In this path, the reflections made in the field of geography, and in partic-ular in this issue, regard on one side the global modifications on interna-tional assets, travels and mobility, globalization and borders, on the other side the changes in the daily way of living, furnishing tools useful to con-trast the pandemic and models for a sustainable development.

Space, diversity, security. Anthropological notes on symbolic control of migration flows. – Focusing on the Italian recent «decreto sicurezza» (Security bill) the article provides an interpretive frame for understanding the symbolic implications of regulating migration flows across the states. While politics would tackle in the past both security and welfare, neoliberal expansion of autonomous capitals has progressively confined the role of professional politicians to preserving security for their constituencies. National decision makers thus need emergencies to legitimate their existence as securitization agents. That exasperation by politics of the sole security dimension of social life within the nation state has exacerbated the otherization of migrants through space (clandestinification) and the space production (local and national) through the otherization and widespread physical marginalization because of their mobility status of people in transit.

Environmental protection and National Energy Balance. Geographical Considerations in the Perspective of a Process of Virtuous Innovation. – The EU’s European Environmental Agency defines the target of pollution limits to be observed by our member’s for the progressive reduction of environmental impact. Italy as a whole respects the limits of the Effort Sharing Decision to 2020, but presents problems of concentration of NO2 and PM10 in many urban areas. Analyzing national energy consumption, we identify the geopolitical and geoeconomic structural causes that condition the structure of the hydrocarbon dependence of the National Energy Balance. Within this “scenario”, the contribution discusses the strategies and interventions necessary for the reshaping of energy consumption towards stable results of active environmental balance.