Cristina Grasseni

Skilled Landscapes: Mapping Practices of Locality

In this paper I focus on a local initiative to produce a hiking map of Valtaleggio (in northern Italy). In the effort of redrawing the valley to attract tourism a group of locals engaged in planning and negotiating visibility, but also got involved in an exercise of memory, remembering the history of their valley through recent changes in the landscape. The ethnographic observation of the ‘map enterprise’ spurs reflections on differing local perceptions of the landscape—and, accordingly, on how practices of locality shape identities.