Ecomuseums, Biodiversity, and Contemporary Art in Europe. – In recent years, the growing dialogue between contemporary art and sustainability has found fertile ground also in ecomuseums. Inspired by international experiences such as Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, or Aerocene by Tomás Saraceno, art has become a key driver in raising awareness of ecological crises. Creative interventions now resonate in European ecomuseums, particularly those in the Mediterranean area, where context-sensitive installations, and collaborative workshops are reshaping the connections between people, biodiversity, and place. This article explores how, between 2011 and 2024, artistic approaches in 26 case studies from France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal have contributed to a new artistic geography. Artistic languages serve as tools for ecological engagement, blending local knowledge and visual culture. The study proposes a framework in which art and biodiversity converge to foster shared ecological responsibility.

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

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.

The Geography of Dante explained to children. – During the 7th century since Dante’s death, a broad reflection on the character and his work has developed, particularly on the value the text retains in the present day.
This contribution has focused on the didactic potential that the text and the illustrations of the places of the Divine Comedy can have in order to introduce children to an understanding of the symbolic and paradigmatic value of the landscape.

From transhumant to sedentary and “return”: the case of small pastoral activities in the Gulf of Augusta. – The processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation that have taken place in the Gulf of Augusta are the result of an ‘oil culture’ that has long favoured economic growth and employment to the detriment of the territorial context and the original productive uses. It thus happens that, within the district formed by the four municipalities of Au-gusta, Melilli, Priolo Gargallo and Syracuse, Sicily, very different forms of economic activity coexist, some inherited from a late industrialism based on the petrochemical industry, others on more ancient agricultural and breeding practices. In this case study, the focus of the research was the observation of a small group of transhumant sheep and goat breeders, originating from an area north of Etna but who, for economic reasons, have become settled in areas that are close to industrial activities and, for the same reasons, transhumate in the small territory of the province of Syracuse. However, dairy products are sold to Etna’s dairies, potentially creating an information gap with the place of production. Between the chemical industry and agriculture, between different livestock farms, the area lives with forced coexistence that can hardly ever be considered an added value for one another, and the reason for this is easy to guess. The aim of the research is to understand these cohabitations and what drove the farmers to leave their territory of origin and settle in the Priolo Gargallo area with its controversial dynamics. To do this, documentation techniques typical of geography and visual research and interview techniques used in anthropological research were used.

Anthropocene and geography. – The concept of Anthropocene is used today in many disciplinary sectors to thematize the issues concerning the enormous and growing impact of human activities on nature. His introduction in the field of geographic studies has placed at the center the reflection on the heart of geographic epistemology: the relationships between human societies and the environment, their ecological consequences, the interpretation of the landscape, the analysis and the critical deconstruction of representations, the relationship between physical and human geography in scientific investigation. The article discusses the contribution of geographers to research on the Anthropocene and presents some ideas on the role that geography can play in scientific research on the Anthropocene. On the one hand, geography can support the critical reading of the ways in which the Anthropocene has also become a concept widely used by the media, contextualizing and deconstructing narratives. On the other hand, also by using the potential of thematic cartography in visualizing data and allowing reflections and analyzes at different scales, helping to territorialize the Anthropocene narrative, highlighting the changes and processes in the different regions of the planet.

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).