Learning from Places: Steps to a Geography of Cultural Heritage1

It is not unusual in the life of ideas that a better definition of a concept, or, even, a discipline, be given ‘from outside ’ the field of study itself, that is, by someone from outside the discipline. But, as one of the wittiest2 contemporary geographers put it: for geography this is the rule, not the exception. Because of its nature and origin, geography is like the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, which any mariner could understand and speak, at the same time, modifying and shaping this language to one's own mother language. According to a historian of philosophy, geography ‘makes connections visible ’ [sie macht Zusammenhänge sichtbar] (Holenstein 2004:7). Zusammenhang is a multifaceted term, also implying the meaning of ‘context’, referring both to the links and the frame: so borrowing a term coined by Paul Valéry, we could day that geography makes implexes3 visible. Zusammenhang is also a keyword in Alexander von Humboldt’s theory, the geographer who in the early 19th century was a forerunner of the study of complexity (Farinelli 2009). In adopting, for the first time in Western tradition, an artistic genre like landscape as a scientific tool, von Humboldt meant by the concept of Zusammenhang the third and final step of the translation in scientific terms of the first global impression an individual has about the world after the intermediate step of the analysi