La geografia serve a fare la guerra?

A map is the result of a cultural workshop very attentive to composing a media message with the tools that are peculiar to it: symbols, scale, colours, place-names. Yet undoubtedly the ‘spirit of the time’ cannot but pervade also the role of the geographer, who lives and works in the same historical context in which the events take place, in this case a world war, which would modify the very nature of the places in which it was fought, re-designing them with new attributes on special ‘war maps’. Through a series of reflections and interviews with geographers, historians, anthropologists and landscape experts (Marco Aime, Piero Del Negro, Giuseppe Dematteis, Franco Farinelli, Giuseppe Gullino, Domenico Luciani, Francesco Micelli, Leonardo Rombai, and Massimo Quaini), the author investigates how a dominant school of thought came to be formed and how this influenced cartography. Maps thus became forms of propaganda, manifestoes to transmit concepts (the natural frontier, the nation) and vindicate the historical, cultural and linguistic sovereignty over territories subjected to other political entities. Together with the Zeitgeist, the cultural spirit of an epoch, the monograph also explores the maps of non-academic geographers, such as Cesare Battisti, who critically proposed other interpretations of the historical rapport between places and communities. But a map is also the result of a subtraction – the third dimension – from the globe, and may multiply its own potentialities as soon as an artist decides to dialogue with it. The book analyzes the extraordinary effectiveness of an artistic gesture capable of producing a new semantic system and a different rapport between man and image of the world. So, is the purpose of geography to make war? Like all forms of knowledge, geography is neither good nor bad: it depends on the use we make of it, because it is man who wakes war, and to achieve his objectives he is willing to use all available disciplines, so not only geography, but physics, chemistry, geometry, mathematics, history, anthropology, linguistics…