Il confine nel pensiero geografico italiano: la dimensione liminare nella produzione scientifica e nelle lezioni accademiche di Paolo Revelli

Which border for Italy after the Treaty of Rapallo according to the interpretation of Italian geography? The border question for our geography has represented, since the Risorgimento, a fundamental issue that has little by little ignited, an intense and animated debate. It is within the Risorgimento uprisings, in fact, that the nationalistic instances take shape, starting from which the idea of border as a natural limit will be structured to identify the right of a State to expand on the territory and to claim the lands considered as “own”. Interest in the natural boundary continued and strengthened especially between the two world wars, even confronting different and contrasting geographical positions. Starting from these theoretical premises, we intended to analyse Paolo Revelli’s scientific production in order to understand his idea of border. Interesting unpublished documents emerge from the private archives of the Dachà-Revelli family, including a corpus of his lectures (mainly held during the academic year 1920-21), in which the geographer deals with the problem of the new political border, defined starting from the Treaty of Rapallo. The typewritten lessons offer interesting geographic insights to reconstruct the liminal problems of what was de- fined from the beginning as a real “geographic mess”. With Revelli, it is possible to highlight the inconsistencies, contradictions and divergences at the basis of a heated diatribe between political and physical borders, between strategic and natural necessities