Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) passed almost his entire life in Naples, taught rhetoric for a small salary, and wrote in the Scienza Nuova one of the strangest and most fertile books of the eighteenth century. Historians read him, and so do philosophers, sociologists, and literary critics. Geographers, according to Elio Manzi, do not, and they are the poorer for it.
Manzi, once professor of geography at Pavia and at Palermo, argues the point in a long essay printed in two installments in the Italian journal Semestrale di Studi e Ricerche di Geografia across 2025 and 2026. He subtitles it “prompts and open considerations.” The label describes both its charm and its limits.
Geography among the Muses
Vico held that the first human beings thought in images before they thought in concepts. Myth was not decoration laid over knowledge; myth was the earliest form of knowledge. He called this poetic wisdom, and from its crude metaphysics he derived the whole family of sciences. One branch yields logic, morals, economics, and politics. The other yields physics, mother of cosmography, then astronomy, which certifies what Vico calls its two daughters: chronology and geography. Nine sciences, nine Muses, all daughters of Jove. A Iove principium Musae.
The order matters. Before geography measured the Earth, Roman augurs marked out the templa caeli, regions of the sky from which omens were read. Measures of heaven preceded measures of ground. Geography, on this account, was a poetic science before it became a positive one, and Vico devoted a chapter of his final book to what he called poetic geography.
Manzi builds on a phrase from that book: geography and chronology are the two eyes of history. Geography must hold together two times that resist each other. Nature’s time runs nearly forever. Human time runs the length of memory. Chronology, a human invention, cuts the vast span down to a size the mind can carry. Without nature there is no geography; without memory there is no chronology. Vico treated the two as parallel lines that cross now and then.
The quarrel with Descartes
Behind every page stands Vico’s antagonist. Descartes had made clear and distinct ideas the test of truth and mathematics the model of knowing. History, law, poetry, and philology failed that test and were demoted to opinion. Vico answered with a principle that has carried his name ever since: we know what we have made. The Latin tag is verum ipsum factum, the true and the made are convertible. God made nature and therefore knows it. Human beings made history, so history lies open to human understanding in a way the natural world never will.
To this Manzi joins a second image, from Vico’s earlier work on the ancient wisdom of the Italians. A mind that knows one thing distinctly resembles a lamp at night: it lights one object and drives everything around it into darkness. The divine mind sees each thing together with all other things at once. Human observation must work one scale at a time.
From that pairing Manzi derives what he calls a geographical metaphysics. Geography, he argues, is the discipline charged with holding local, regional, and planetary scales in a single view, and it can no longer do so. Economic interest and state power obscure the interactions that now compound at unfamiliar speed. He names the sorcerer’s apprentice. Geography, riding between short time and semi-eternal time, might have helped. Instead, he says, it has retreated into a smaller and more ideological version of itself.
The indictment
The charge sheet is specific. Giuseppe Dematteis, among the most influential Italian geographers of the past half century, devotes a chapter of one book to reflections on poetic geography; Vico’s chapter of the same title goes unmentioned. Franco Farinelli, whose life’s work concerns the hidden logic of maps, never names him. A recent Italian volume on geography and philosophy omits him. Lucio Gambi, the great postwar historical geographer, admired the enlightened territorial thinkers of the eighteenth century yet halted his survey of Italy around the latitude of Tuscany, and with the south absent the Neapolitan could not appear. Adalberto Vallega, a cultural geographer now largely forgotten, is Manzi’s lone exception: a few pages, well aimed. In 1925 Cosimo Bertacchi noted that geographical thinking stirred in Italy long before Montesquieu, and named Vico. Franco Salvatori posed the same question again in 2024.
Why the silence? Manzi offers suspicions rather than a verdict. Vico is difficult. He professes Catholic doctrine loudly. He is insufficiently Marxist, having failed to be born a century later. Above all he is too Neapolitan for a discipline that reads philosophy like a school syllabus and prefers Germans. Behind the particular charge lies a general one: Italian geography has disowned its own history and now risks disappearing from the curriculum it no longer justifies.
Weighing the case
The recovery is genuine. Vico did assign geography a place in the architecture of knowledge, did bind it to the mind’s grasp of time, and did write on poetic geography while geographers looked elsewhere. Manzi is right, too, to refuse the crib-sheet Vico, the schoolroom fable of cycles endlessly repeating. Vico’s corsi e ricorsi return with a difference, and the difference is the whole argument.
The interpretation strains in three places.
First, the company Manzi keeps for Vico is chosen by affinity rather than by argument. Lovelock, Prigogine, von Bertalanffy, Vernadsky, and the French geographer Augustin Berque appear as fellow visionaries of long time. Systems ecology makes odd kin for a philologist of divine providence, and the kinship is asserted, not shown. The lamp is a claim about the limits of finite knowing. Converting it into a mandate for planetary scale-integration is Manzi’s move, not Vico’s.
Second, and more seriously, the principle Manzi cites cuts against the use he makes of it. If we know only what we have made, then nature, God’s work, stands beyond us, and history, our work, lies within reach. That premise licenses a geography of human works and withholds a geography of the Earth. Manzi wants Vico as the patron of an ecological geography; the doctrine points the other way. A defense is available. Landscape is made, the humanized Earth is our artifact, and the artifact is knowable in Vico’s strict sense. Manzi argued something close to that in an earlier essay. Here he leaves the tension untouched, and it is the first tension a skeptical reader would press.
Third, the strongest available argument goes unused. Vico’s poetic geography describes how early peoples carried familiar names outward onto unknown lands until the map recorded the vanity of nations rather than the shape of the world. That is a critique of cartographic reason, and it is precisely the ground Farinelli has spent a career mapping. Manzi observes Farinelli’s silence and waits, courteously, for a documented rebuttal. He never shows what breaking the silence would yield. The essay proves the neglect. It does not measure the loss.
The digressions cost something as well. Regional politics, mafias, missile prices, and a European directive on bottle caps date a piece that pleads for long time. And the joke about Vico’s failure to read Marx betrays the real quarrel: not with Vico’s readers but with Gambi’s heirs.
The defense of the form
Judged as a treatise, the essay wanders. Judged as what it announces itself to be, the wandering is method. Vico proceeded by etymology, myth, and analogy, trusting imagination where demonstration failed, and Manzi follows the same road. It runs through Naples: the egg as an ancient emblem of the world, Virgil remembered as a magician, Pulcinella hatched from a shell, and the boy who fell from a ladder in his father’s bookshop and lay for five hours watching the world upside down. It ends at the adamantine rock of Vico’s letter of 1725, the high place where, he wrote, the judgment of God had steadied him.
There Manzi leaves his reader: on a small height, with hope, and with a study still to be written. He has drawn the coastline. The survey remains.
Manzi, Elio. “La Geografia senza tempo di Giambattista Vico: Spunti e considerazioni aperte” [pt. 1]. Semestrale di Studi e Ricerche di Geografia 37, no. 2 (2025): 127–37.
Manzi, Elio. “La Geografia senza tempo di Giambattista Vico: Spunti e considerazioni aperte” [pt. 2]. Semestrale di Studi e Ricerche di Geografia 38, no. 1 (2026): 163–71.
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