Abstract
The project For an Atlas of Italian Ecological Literature: From the Great Acceleration to the Pandemic (LEDA) aims to create the first digital atlas of Italian ecological literature, conceived as an innovative research infrastructure for the study, visualization, and interpretation of the relationship between literature, space, and the environment in contemporary Italy. Hosted on a dedicated website equipped with an interactive hypertextual architecture, the atlas is designed to provide the first systematic survey of Italian environmental literature from the post-war period to the present, offering both a research tool and a methodological model for future investigations in environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and digital literary studies. The project is structured around three interconnected research objectives. The first concerns the study of narrative space and the environment as literary categories. Drawing on a corpus of approximately one hundred fictional and non-fictional prose works that critically engage with environmental issues, the research investigates not only the thematic dimension of ecological writing but also its formal and narratological structures. Particular attention is devoted to the elaboration of an analytical framework capable of describing how literary texts construct, represent, and transform geographical and environmental spaces. The second objective focuses on the digital mapping of literary spaces. Combining literary scholarship with expertise in digital humanities, data visualization, and information technologies, the project develops an interactive platform through which literary texts are connected to the Italian territories they represent. The atlas enables users to navigate simultaneously through geographical locations, narrative spaces, ecocritical categories, and interpretative pathways, thus illuminating the complex relationships between real environments and their literary representations. The third research objective concerns the public dimension of environmental storytelling. Alongside scholarly investigation, the project promotes dissemination activities and public engagement initiatives designed to foster dialogue between academic research, local communities, and wider audiences. By encouraging reflection on the relationship between literature, environmental awareness, and the lived experience of place, the project seeks to strengthen public understanding of ecological issues through the humanities. The three research units—Università IULM (Milan), the University of Bologna, and the University of Siena—worked in close collaboration throughout the project, sharing research methodologies, data collection procedures, and theoretical approaches. Postdoctoral researchers played a central role in building and annotating the corpus, defining metadata, and developing the atlas contents, while dedicated IT expertise ensured the implementation of a stable, expandable, and user-friendly digital infrastructure.
Results achieved
All planned objectives were fully achieved. The project's principal outcome is the completion of the Atlas of Italian Ecological Literature, an interactive digital platform that enables users to explore, visualize, and analyse the corpus of Italian environmental literature through integrated textual, geographical, and interpretative layers. The atlas, publicly available online, represents the first digital research environment specifically devoted to mapping ecological literature in Italy from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day and constitutes a permanent research infrastructure designed to support future scholarly developments. Alongside the development of the platform, the project produced a structured and extensively annotated corpus of Italian ecological literature. The initial database of approximately one hundred texts was progressively expanded, refined, and fully tagged according to thematic, formal, narratological, and geographical criteria. The resulting metadata architecture provides the scientific foundation of the atlas, allowing users to investigate literary works through multiple interconnected perspectives while ensuring interoperability and future scalability. A further major achievement of the project is the development of a coherent methodological framework for the narratological analysis of narrative space. Building upon a comprehensive review of existing scholarship, the research team elaborated an innovative analytical model that was discussed during a dedicated international workshop and subsequently implemented within the atlas through the "Pathways" section. These interpretative routes offer readers multiple ways of navigating the corpus while illustrating recurring spatial configurations, ecological imaginaries, and narrative strategies. The project also contributed significantly to the theoretical advancement of ecocritical studies by identifying recurrent environmental themes, validating analytical categories across the corpus, and experimenting with forms of public engagement involving local communities. The integration of literary criticism, narratology, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and spatial analysis has resulted in an interdisciplinary methodological model that can be extended to other literary traditions and geographical contexts. Dissemination constituted a central component of the project throughout its entire duration. In addition to the presentation of research results at numerous national and international conferences, the consortium organised a broad programme of scientific and public events. These included public initiatives promoted by the IULM Unit in Milan involving writers, artists, and scholars in discussions on real and fictional spaces; a public screening and discussion with the writer Tommaso Pincio organised by the University of Bologna; the international workshop on narrative space held at IULM University in February 2025; the two-day ecocriticism workshop organised by the University of Siena in May 2025; and the final international conference hosted by the University of Bologna in January 2026, during which the digital atlas was officially launched and presented to the scholarly community. Workshops, lectures, Winter School activities, and teaching initiatives further extended the project's impact among students, researchers, and the wider public. The scientific outcomes of the project continue to be disseminated through an extensive publication programme. A collective volume arising from the international workshop held at IULM University has been accepted for publication in De Gruyter's Narratologia series under a Retrospective Open Access agreement, while a special issue of the journal Finzioni dedicated to the results of the Siena workshop and the Bologna conference is currently in preparation. Numerous individual essays and conference papers produced by members of the research team have further expanded the project's scholarly impact at both national and international levels. Additional dissemination initiatives—including webinars, lecture series, public presentations, and conference panels—are planned beyond the formal conclusion of the project, ensuring the continued visibility and development of its results. Throughout its implementation, the project fully complied with the principles of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan concerning environmental sustainability (DNSH), Open Access, gender equality, generational inclusion, and equal opportunities. As a digitally based research initiative, it relied primarily on existing institutional infrastructures and minimized environmental impact, while all dissemination and publication strategies were conceived according to Open Access principles. Recruitment procedures, team composition, and scientific events consistently reflected a balanced participation across different career stages and genders, reinforcing the project's commitment to inclusive and sustainable research practices. Overall, LEDA has produced not only an original interpretation of contemporary Italian ecological literature but also a permanent digital infrastructure, a scientifically validated research corpus, and an innovative methodological framework that is expected to become a reference point for future studies in environmental humanities, ecocriticism, narratology, and digital literary scholarship.Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Riccardo Gasperina Geroni
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica
Coordinator:
Libera Università di lingue e comunicazione IULM-MI(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 77.000,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
30/11/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
