Franco Farinelli is an Italian geographer who was born in Ortona in 1948. Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bologna, he is also head of the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies and president of the Associazione dei Geografi Italiani (Italian Geographers Association). He has taught in universities in Geneva, Los Angeles (UCLA), Berkeley (UCB), the Sorbonne (Paris) and also at the Nordic Institute for Urban and Regional Planning in Stockholm. His studies have renewed the history of Geography and Cartography and placed it at the core of western culture. In his wide-ranging transversal approach, Professor Farinelli has revealed the complex, ambivalent relationships between geographic representations of the world and its economy, politics, society and, naturally, territory. For Farinelli, cartography explains why the world is like it is and, at the same time, why it is no longer useful for understanding it. He has published several books, including Geografia. Un'introduzione ai modelli del mondo (2003), L'invenzione della Terra (2007) and La crisi della ragione cartografica(2009).
