On the Trail of Emilio Sereni in Val Polcevera (Genoa). Iconographic Sources and Fieldwork for Environmental History

Abstract

This work is inspired by some photographs taken in Val Polcevera (Liguria, Italy) in September 1951 by Emilio Sereni (1907-1977), a scholar whose contribution to the foundation of historical landscape studies in Italy is well known. In Sereni's fundamentally “continuist” interpretation, the images had to document a landscape typology (the “marrelo”) due to ancient techniques. Today, in the light of more recent studies, these images take on a new role once they are inserted into a wider network of iconographic, textual and field sources. In fact, the preliminary results of this research show how a historical-geographical micro-analysis that begins with the identification of the photographed sites can better document the environmental processes that have crossed the ecology of the rural landscapes documented by Sereni himself and their resources. All this in order to guide the actions of environmental planning and enhancement of local productions in a context that is currently at the center of various urban regeneration projects.