ABSTRACT
Geographers, as physical persons, of whom there were 88 in Italy according to the World Directory of Geographers published in 1952, numbered almost 500 on the basis of an assessment made by the Association of Italian Geographers around 1980. The history of cartography and the history of exploration have been those sectors contributing most to the relative decline of the historic-geographical branches of political geography discipline. It was the 1930s which marked the climax of this good season of Italian geography, notwithstanding the increasing weight of conditioning from the regime and the unfortunate, passive conformity to Fascist directives of too many Italian geographers: the 'years of consent' had arrived. Italian Marxist geography, however, has little connection with the contemporary radicalism of Harvey or Peet, little with Gambi's historicist criticism before it, and even less with developments in Soviet geography. Self-reproduction, on the other hand, tends to preserve those harmful aspects of individualism which Almagia has decried.
