Paesaggio e musei: la prospettiva della geografia

This article explores the changing relationships that have historically developed between geography and museums and suggests ways of revitalizing them. Despite the scanty attention paid to museums by geographers till recent decades, a historical analysis reveals the existence of some interesting projects and experiences of geographical museums in the first part of the twentieth century: the well-known Outlook Tower founded by P. Geddes, and the less-studied cases of the Central Geographical Museum, created in Leningrad by V.P. Semenov-Tjan-Šanskij, and of the Museum für Länderkunde, organized in Leipzig by R. Reinhardt. None of these museums survived till the second half of the century and their decline marked the failure of the attempt to establish institutional links between geography and museums. In the recent phase, geographers have abandoned the encyclopaedic project that inspired these first experiments and the attention to museums is linked to more sectorial interests in heritage themes. These interests arose first in the geographical traditions closer to History and Ethnology, and more recently also in the approaches of New Cultural Geography and Local Development studies. The article analyses the contributions offered by these three approaches to museums and stresses the need to overcome the rifts that at present divide them, for a more fruitful exchange with museums’ world.