HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY AND EXPLORATION

Course title: Discovering and thinking about the world. Students will be presented with a dual study approach which interweaves the physical discovery of the planet’s regions (from the earliest explorations of the Mediterranean basin through to modern-day travel, including from a female perspective) with the development of geographical thinking. Means, times, purposes and results of the practice of travelling; geographer-travellers and deskbound geographers. Geography too has its philosophers: Kant, Humboldt, Ratzel, Reclus and Vidal de la Blache. What is the role of the geographer (and of geography) in Italy? An in-depth study of Alexander von Humboldt, thinker and traveller, founder of human geography.