Abstract
In this essay, Prof. Battisti reflects upon how his professional career from journalism to the academic world of the former Institute of Geography at the University of Trieste in the early 1970s. He shows the mechanisms of recruitment—a targeted invitation to apply that in international academia is usually reserved for senior administrators—and the affective geography of the layout of the Institute as a powerful influence on his early ideas. He also walks the reader through the relationship with his mentors, which were in turn shaped by the latest ideas of their mentors, tracing back to the foundation of the university in 1924. Such intergenerational continuity shaped his vision of the discipline as a synthetic field encompassing the human and physical domains, methodologically rooted in historically conscious, data-driven analyses.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, he introduced in Italy Walter Christaller’s location theory (Battisti 2006).
- 2.
Later I understood the value of the eclectic frame of mind I had learned as a journalist. Early in my academic career, I rejected it, due to the enthusiasm of the neophyte, which made me embrace the notion of specialized knowledge. Such attitude was the legacy of undergraduate education, at the time based on rigidly distinct disciplinary fields. Later I learned that academic innovation requires cross-disciplinary fertilization to tackle new ideas and topics. Moreover, in geography, more than in other disciplines, specialization is not limited to the object of analysis but includes the intersection between the area of inquiry and the chosen methodology.
- 3.
Vocation is a central theme in Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy. Gaete (2016) synthesized it as follows: El hombre solo aprende lo que él es, siéndolo. Ensaya multiples caminos. Y cuando encuentra el bueno, experimenta “el prodigioso fenómeno de la felicidad” [man learns who he is only by being. He tries multiple paths. When he finds the good one, he experiences “the wondrous phenomenon of happiness”].
- 4.
My hiring—especially the fact I received a call out of the blue—is unheard of in Italian, and I guess any other academic job. I learned only later what happened. Roughly translating Italian administrative structures in a language familiar to an Anglo-American audience, the Institute had asked and obtained a new tenure-track line in economic geography to hire a certain Marzio Strassoldo. He had just graduated with a highly innovative thesis, the first in Italian academia to use Christaller’s location theory; he had also shown dexterity with quantitative methods. Amid the quantitative revolution in geography, he was a very appealing candidate (Strassoldo 1973). Unfortunately for geographers, the larger and better-funded Institute of Statistics offered him a job first. Therefore, to avoid losing the tenure-track line, geographers had to find a suitable candidate fast. They didn’t have anyone in the pipeline, so they selected among recent graduates in economics, looking at students with the highest GPA, and paying particular attention to the grades in math, economics, statistics, and foreign languages—which were considered the most relevant areas of expertise for an economic geographer. The selection committee consisted of the Institute director and a junior faculty member, Dr. Maria Paola Pagnini, who now leads the doctoral program in political geography at Nicolo Cusano University in Rome.
- 5.
Three years later, my mentor, Dr. Bonetti started the meeting of the tenure committee by stating “Let it be clear that I am willing to fail anyone, including my own candidate.” Unlike in the USA, tenure and promotion committee meetings may be tough and confrontational, with mixed commissions of internal and external senior faculty members who sometimes grind the candidate, who has to defend his or her research accomplishments. For most candidates, the mentor’s presence helps, but I have no doubt Bonetti would have failed—and thus fired—me if I had not convinced him of the quality of my work. Italian faculty members are recruited by cooptation, but we must adhere to rigorous ethical principles when called to evaluate candidates.
- 6.
Then I went to college. University studies—even though journalism took the bulk of my time—deeply affected me. I soon realized that life in a newspaper’s editorial staff was too narrow for me. So, halfway through university, I refused a job offer in the city’s paper, hoping in something better.
- 7.
After his retirement, I inherited his professorship, his desk, and even the position of chair of the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences, which was the evolution of the Institute of Geography.
- 8.
Thanks to his expertise in IT, he is now Italy’s most prominent expert in remote sensing and automated cartography.
- 9.
I am particularly sympathetic to the “oriented process” approach in regional geography, championed in Italy by Vallega (1995). Vallega was a tireless worker, a true gentleman, and a friend of our Institute of Geography. He was president of the International Geographical Union, until his untimely death due to illness.
- 10.
I believe the warning that Francesco Compagna gave leftist geographers during the upheavals of 1968 is even more relevant today: “my children, you cannot get rid of [concrete] places, otherwise you will become castaways in an imagined geography” (1970, p. 900).
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Sellar, C., Battisti, G. (2023). Becoming a Geographer in Trieste. Autobiographical Essay, Reflecting on the Nature of Geography. In: Geopolitical Perspectives from the Italian Border. Historical Geography and Geosciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26044-5_3
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