The Creative Destruction of the Urban Social Infrastructures in the Antico Corso neighborhood, Catania. – This work retraces the transformation of the Antico Corso neighbourhood in Catania. Here, the ongoing ambitious project to convert a dismantled hospital into a multifunctional site including museum services and students’ housing is critically reinterpreted in light of processes layered over time in the district, dating back to the late 1970s conversion of a former Baroque convent into a university campus and to the gradual studentification that unfolded over three decades, recently intersecting with the growth of tourist accommodation.
The dismantling and reorganization of public services, integrated with or replaced by new, elitist or privatized functions such as university education, cultural consumption, and tourism practices, make it even more crucial to reflect through a historical lens on the district habitability and on the role of social reproduction for the local community.

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.

Soil consumption, climate change, and large commercial structures. The Italian case study. – In Italy, between 2006 and 2022, over 1,200 km2 of land was consumed, most of which was derived from urban expansion processes. There are many relationships between soil consumption and climate change, both in causes and consequences. In this work, I focus on the soil consumption of large commercial structures, such as shopping centers, factory outlets, and retail parks. In Italy, there are over 1,300 of these structures, and – apart from the few cases that have occupied areas derived from the reconversion of abandoned industrial sites or other urbanized areas – they have mostly developed in rural areas or by occupying residual urban and suburban green areas. In this work, I first reviewed the interna-tional literature on soil consumption deriving from GSCs, discovering that it is extremely rare and does not deal with this type of urbanization independently but only in a generic way as one of the many aspects of urban sprawl. Instead, they become protagonists of scientific literature when they are abandoned. There is no specific legislation in the European Union or Italy on soil consumption in commercial areas. In Italy, the legislature in this matter is delegated to the regions. Still, despite the existence of restrictive regional laws on land consumption, there is no effective response to the problem at the moment.

Waste: the contribution of Zero Waste and geography to the implementation of the PNRR. – Waste is a central problem of global society, capable of deeply undermining the future of the planet. The consumerist mentality and practices are know for guaranteeing productions capable of responding to a growing demand that is ever more diversified. However, less concern has been given to the so-called final ring of the economic system, the one related to waste management. This lack of attention has ensured that a solution to the issue of waste cannot be longer postponed, but has to be considered the starting point for reconsidering the entire process, investing with energy and foresight on the cultural, even before economic, value of circularity, as an alternative to the short-sighted and no long-er sustainable linear model. And it is precisely within this framework, theoretical and practical at the same time, that the PNRR policies must depart and try to be effective, capable of taking up the challenge proposed by Zero Waste: overturn the metaphor of the pyramid and insert in the broad apex a new design of the entire production and consumption chain, at the corporate and domestic, collective and individual, local and global levels. This desirable renewed direction of thought will benefit from the help of geographical reflection, able to propose, thanks to its gaze capable of keeping together different elements and various plans, important concepts and functional criteria to undertake a definitive change of course, towards an effective sustainability.

Environmental transition and energy transition. A regional analysis – The relationship between environmental quality and GDP has been emphasized in the past, placing the accent on the “natural” trend towards improving environmental quality during the maturity of economic growth, after its deterioration in “takeoff” phases of the economy, according the socalled Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). This condition has in many parts been disavowed or weakened. In the same way, an attempt was made to read the energy transition through the EKC filter, but a regional analysis, carried out within the European Union, of the components of the energy transition (energy demand, intensity of energy, consumption of fossil fuels and renewables) shows that these conditions can vary considerably from country to country and that policies can determine changes, not just economic growth.

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.

Pandemic crisis and economic crisis. The historiographical debate on the effects of the Black Death. – The great plague which hit Europe from 1348 has long been at the core of different historiographical interests. Alongside research focusing on the demographic consequences of the plague, other studies examined strictly epidemiologic issues, the socio-political effects of the crisis, or its „emotive‟ impact in the long term. Among the questions taken into consideration, the relationship between plague and economic trends has obviously played a crucial part. The essay aims to look at this debate, especially highlighting the significant interpretative changes which emerged in the past few decades. The gloomy picture of the post-plague economy, marked by a long decline, has now been replaced by a more optimistic view, which tends to underline the positive consequences brought about by the demographic drop in the medium-long term: in terms of wage growth, for instance, or increase in consumption, but also of the weakening of aristocratic control over peasants‟ work, processes of productive specialization, and the increase of commercial exchange.

Sport, Tourism and environment: rethinking local development in the times of Covid-19. – The contribution aims to try to imagine possible territorial development paths starting from the relaunch of individual and team sports, from sporting events driving tourism and from the environment, parks and biodiversity. The costs, in social and economic terms, that Covid-19 is causing on sport and tourism, can only be absorbed if we can quickly identify new forms and new methods of practice and social consumption. The organizational reconfigurations that will concern three major sporting events such as the Tokyo Olympics, the Winter Olympics in Cortina, the Ryder Cup in Rome can serve as a laboratory to rethink a new local development that serves as a basis for rebuilding trust in a global dimension that today it seems tarnished.

 

The Protection of Agricultural Areas and Urban Legislation. Reflections on Building Uses of Rural Soils. – Since the Second World War, the dynamics that have animated the processes of urbanization have generated a radical transformation of the Italian rural landscape causing a change not only in order to the localization modalities residential functions but, more generally, on the whole organizational structure of the territory. As far as the protection of agricultural areas is concerned, the Italian town planning legislation has taken on a role only in recent times, referring to the concept of reducing land consumption.
Starting from a brief overview of the international context, the contribution focuses on the regional scale highlighting the critical issues of the regulatory system of reference, identifying some critical elements relating to the lack of protection of the agricultural territory.
In the conclusions some brief indications for updating the regulatory framework are proposed.

 

The “Global ’68” of the Students. An Introductory Historiographical Survey. – The article highlights the historiographical issue represented by the planetary character of the youth movements that operated around 1968 in the Western world, in the Socialist world and in the developing countries. The wave of student protest is therefore considered as a phenomenon of global history, and presented in its various aspects in the light of the historiographical debate developed in the context of the Global History current. Particular attention is given to the problem of periodization and to the comparison between political, social and cultural history. 1968 emerges as a great watershed of the second post-war period, which acts as a hinge between the first globalization of Bretton Woods (the so-called Golden Age) and the new scenarios of postindustrial modernity.

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.

New rurality and geographic food. A "filosofale" formula  for Abruzzo. – Geographic food is an expression that indicates the deep relationships between territory and eating costums. More precisely, in regard to the current post-modernity, it defines the need of recovering the cultural identities in the sphere of the concepts of place and collective tradition. Such need, which derives in a reactive way from the tendencies of uniformity produced by the mass consumption, can be considered always more as the way of escape deriving from the bottom that works against the processes of globalization and industrialization of the cultural products. Including those related to the field of food and eating customs.
In Abruzzo, the places of contemporary rural context do not seem to escape from such phenomenon. It is clearly proved by the rediscovery of old culinary habits in relation to the farming and pastoral past, the recovery of the agricultural biodiversity, the commercial achievement of local and traditional products, which is noticeably manifested through the country festivals, the proliferation of the country style wine and food places and the increasing diffusion of the farm holiday procedures.