BARTOLOMEO MALFATTI

UN GEOGRAFO DIMENTICATO

Abstract

The article analyses the geographical works of Bartolomeo Malfatti, one of the first professors of geography in the Italian universities, an Enlightenment thinker who advocated Darwin’s Evolutionism, and an indeterminist with a clear positivist view of science. Linked essentially to the pre-paradigmatic phase of science, his vision of geography, which had a strong indeterministic literary and historical imprint (which has partly characterized nineteenth-century geography), was supplanted by the new naturalistic and scientific geography, which was made up almost entirely of natural-science scholars who soon tried to sever the ties with the past by erasing even scholars like Bartolomeo Malfatti from the memory of the discipline.