Geography is an ancient science, but in the globalized world it is once again central for its ability to renew itself and for the holistic vision it offers to many current issues, with important keys to interpreting the growing complexity of the world we live in, both with respect to the theme of the crisis (real or only presumed) of globalization, and with respect to the theme of sustainability, with particular reference to the culture of water and the relationship between the environment and food. These are precisely the themes dealt with by the new cycle proposed by the Ateneo Veneto and curated by its partner Carlo Rubini, noting that globalization nonetheless remains the conceptual horizon of reference for interpreting the world in which we live, as a complex process, contradictory and conflicting, never predictable in its outcomes. In the first meeting, the geographer Franco Farinelli addresses the theme of the “leap of scale” that modernity has founded as a novelty, mapping the entire globe and its parts, the states, making them adapt to their maps. The Earth has therefore assumed the nature of a map, and therefore space and time have long guided our relationship with it. Up to the new leap in scale that the Net and new technologies have imposed in the last decades of the last century, dematerializing the deeply rooted space-time relationship.
