Azerbaijan in the account of the trip to the East by Felice De Vecchi (1841-1842)

Abstract The article aims to illustrate how Azerbaijan appeared in the eyes of an Italian who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, had the opportunity to visit it during a trip to Constantinople. Between 1841 and 1842, Felice De Vecchi, a wealthy Milanese passionate about painting and travel, embarked on a journey, together with his naturalist friend Gaetano Osculati, to Constantinople and then, through Persia, visited India. He kept a diary of that journey, only recently found in its almost totality, dedicating an entire chapter to Azerbaijan, the "land of fires". From his account, rich in anthropological and pictorial notations, emerges a very well-defined sketch that does not hide the wonder of those who meet housing situations and customs far from their country of origin. In order not to lose the most emotional component contained in De Vecchi's writing, the frequent quotations of passages from the diary are presented in the English translation, followed by the original text in nineteenth-century Italian

Chapter Il ruolo dell’utopia, del mito e dell’immaginario nella concezione della geografia di Massimo Quaini

Myth, utopia and the imaginary have represented fundamental categories of geographical thought, as Massimo Quaini highlighted in several of his contributions, which underlined their influence and importance for the history of geography in the construction and development of geographical concepts. The weight and role of these categories of interpretation of geographical reality were particularly important at the time of the great geographical discoveries in the process of opening the European horizon to new worlds, a complex process in which the geographical imaginary represented a stimulus and a push, as it happened for the genesis and development of the Colombian conceptual universe

Storia delle esplorazioni e studi colombiani

ITALIANO: Nella prima parte di questo contributo, accanto all’analisi del viaggio nel vicino Oriente del castigliano Pero Tafur, l’attenzione si è rivolta alle ricerche sviluppate negli ultimi tré decenni dell’Ottocento da Cornelio Desimoni sui navigatori genovesi che contribuirono all’apertura delle rotte atlantiche, nonché su alcuni protagonisti, come Giovanni Caboto, Giovanni da Verrazzano e Amerigo Vespucci, della scoperta ed esplorazione del Nuovo Mondo. La seconda parte è stata dedicata invece agli studi sulle questioni colombiane (luogo di nascita, ambiente familiare, testamento dell’Ammiraglio, le fonti, ecc.). / ENGLISH: In the first part of this paper, attention is paid to the researches developed during the last three decades of the nineteenth century by Cornelio Desimoni on the Genoese sailors who contributed to the opening of the Atlantic routes, as well as on some principal figures (such as Giovanni Caboto, Giovanni da Verrazzano and Amerigo Vespucci) involved in the discovery and exploration of the New World. The second part is focused on the Columbus’s historical issues (place of birth, family environment, Admiral’s last will, sources, etc.)