Walking Rome without leaving home: practicing cultural geography during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The time of COVID-19 lockdown has given us an opportunity to practice experimental methodologies of cultural geography. I use early-20th-century Polish guides to Rome, Italy, to provide exercises in auto-geography. The aim of these exercises is to enrich the practice of cultural geography by opening up to self-exploration and combining lectures and imagination with distanced spaces. These exercises relate to finding the hidden narrator, understanding locational formulations, and assessing the role of our own assumptions and memories in studying urban narratives. Although travel guides are typically read as sources of historical and cultural knowledge, I propose also reading them to better understand the relationship between reading practice and the researcher’s prior knowledge.