1154 | 374 | Geo-history for climate study. A didactical purpose on Little Ice Age and Climate Change in the Italian context | Filiberto Ciaglia, Lavinia Lucidi

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« Geo-history for climate study » is an educational activity conceived within the framework of the three-year degree course in Geographical Sciences for the Environment and Health at La Sapienza University of Rome. The didactic laboratory aimed to provide students with an in-depth study of geographical and geohistorical studies on climate variations in the Anthropocene and the effects on human societies in the short and long term. The first part was distinguished by an approach to the documentary sources, both manuscript and printed, relating to the Little Ice Age with particular regard to the freezing of Lake Fucino, chosen as a case study because it was unexplored in the literature and was the subject of recent discoveries of archival material, thus functional for an initial approach to the manuscripts. The focus then shifted to the impact of global warming from the mid-19th century to the visionary geography emerged in the work Viaggio nell’Italia dell’Antropocene set in the distant 2786, encouraging a critical debate on the narration and perception of climate change also because “geography, precisely because of its descriptive and interpretative characteristics of the environment and the various territorial realities, would lend itself very well to the work of dissemination and narration”. _x000D_
The cognitive and metacognitive phase of the circular action-research process brought out how difficult it is to deal with environmental issues that are not perceived on a human scale but on different temporal scales. The aim of the activity has been, in any case, to provide the group with the useful tools to understand the complementary role of the geographer in the study of climate, especially with regard to the specific preparation on « qualitative evidence on weather and climatic facts (generally exceptional ones) » that can be deduced, sometimes even indirectly, from a careful reading of documentary material._x000D_

Filiberto Ciaglia, Lavinia Lucidi
Sapienza University of Rome
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