This paper introduces a novel geoheritage map of the Portofino Natural Park. The park is an internationally well-known area, protected since 1935, located in the Ligurian Apennines, 25 km E of Genoa. It has 80 km of hiking trails which are used by visitors all year around. The map was produced by combining geological and geomorphological data, geoheritage elements and data from hiking and tourist maps. It is intended to be a base map from which can be derived applied maps. With appropriate integrations and simplifications, these can be useful tools for the management of highly frequented protected areas. The methodological approach involved aerial photo interpretation, bibliographical research, field work and the use of data from the Park archives. The original base map was produced by using a Digital Terrain Model raster (5 m) and vector layers for the different cartographical elements.

This paper assesses the potential of software developed by the research group of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in order to georeference and vectorise historical landscape photographs. The use of this 'Monoplotting' Tool introduces a new application for topographical photographs and opens up the possibility of using such photographs for measuring land-use change. This paper reviews the literature on the use of historical photographs for landscape history. It introduces the new software and then goes on to examine how vectorised topographical photographs may help in the measurement of land-use changes in the mountainous landscape of Liguria and Trentino in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

The paper deals with an automated methodology for the digital acquisition of thematic information from historical maps in order to use them for spatial analysis in a GIS software. This methodology has been applied to an early XIX c. map in order to assess the historical changes in the forest coverage in Trentino. Specifically, a tailored Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) and filtering procedure has been applied to digitize and georeference Cesare Battisti’s map of forest density published in his atlas “Il Trentino. Economic Statistical Illustration” from 1915. According to the historical ecology approach, forest history can be analyzed and evaluated with the use of historical documentary sources. Following this approach, historical cartography is a precious information tool, and in many respects unique, through which it is possible to reconstruct the evolution of the forest cover of a given territory. Trentino, in particular, has a rich heritage of historical maps from which to draw useful information for the construction of a qualitative and quantitative diachronic picture of the evolutionary dynamics of wooded areas. In these territories, forest management is a topic of great importance both for its socio-economic implications and for the more strictly environmental ones, connected to the increasingly urgent need to implement mitigation and adaptation policies towards climate change. Thus, the paper presents the historical maps and illustrates the methodology used for the digitisation. Data extracted by the historical sources have been compared with the current one in order to identify changes in forest density in the last century.

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Scholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.