L'Atlante Fisico-Economico d'Italia

Summary

Drawing on his long personal experience, Giotto Dainelli recounts the genesis, delayed realization, and final completion of the Physical-Economic Atlas of Italy. He first conceived the project 37 years earlier during a stay in Vienna, influenced by the geographical school there and possibly by the Finnish Atlas. Convinced that such a work should represent current conditions rather than become an outdated historical document, he nevertheless saw the initial idea remain dormant for a quarter of a century because of material difficulties, insufficient statistical data, and the lack of a publisher. Although the project was discussed at the 1921 Florence Geographical Congress, no action followed. The decisive stimulus came when he saw preliminary plates of a similar atlas at the Paris and Warsaw Geographical Congresses. Supported by Mussolini, he secured a publisher and undertook an extremely intense five-year effort, personally constructing and drawing more than 400 of the 600 maps (1935-1939). The atlas was designed to give a comprehensive picture of Italy around 1930. Its natural-environment maps, such as relief, geology, rainfall, and temperature, are treated as introductory, explaining the demographic and economic patterns that form the core of the volume. A major methodological advantage was the use of three censuses almost simultaneous in time—the 1927 industrial census, the 1929 agricultural cadastre, and the 1931 population census—thus avoiding anachronisms. The author also included smaller historical maps to show dynamic trends, particularly improvements in morbidity and infant mortality due to Italian sanitary and social policies. Dainelli stresses that geography must be a living science: an atlas produced too slowly would portray an already superseded past rather than the present, and therefore its preparation had to be as rapid as possible. He likewise recommends that similar works be repeated periodically, acting like a thorough clinical chart for a nation, to assess progress and identify weaknesses. Finally, he appeals for international cooperation among scholars in adopting uniform cartographic methods—common scales, gradations, and coincidence of reference dates—so that major distributive phenomena can be compared across countries, offering a wider scientific and humanitarian perspective beyond national boundaries. The article thus combines an autobiographical account of scholarly perseverance with a methodological statement on the nature and purpose of national economic atlases.