Il ritratto e la penombra. Sul percorso accademico di Claudia Merlo, studentessa, collaboratrice e assistente nell’Istituto di Geografia (1929-1939)

Abstract

This contribution is part of research on the relationship between academic geographical heritage and the recovery of biographies of geographers who worked at the Institute of Geography at the Sapienza University of Rome. Through the use of printed sources and archival documentation, the figure of Claudia Merlo has been studied in her path as a student, collaborator and assistant to Professor Roberto Almagià, not only to reconstruct her career history but in order to understand all activities carried out in the faculty. Support for teaching, bibliographic cataloguing and research are just some of the task that characterised her collaboration, not to mention parallel travels required by the writing of her degree thesis and the work at Italian Enciclopedia, in Florence. In addition to these topics, there is a reflection on the reception of his writings in the national geographical debate, that highlights the ambivalence of judgments suspended between the recognition of the validity of the research and the “cage” of the conception of the geography as a comprehensive discipline, broken only after World War II.