Center for the History of the Mountains, Material Culture and Earth Sciences

The Research Center is based on a project that involved university professors, researchers and scholars of different backgrounds and belonging to different disciplinary fields, including the human, natural and environmental sciences. The aim of the Center includes the expansion and development, also through the use of innovative methodologies, of the potential for interdisciplinary interaction relating to homogeneous research activities between different scientific and humanistic skills. This is a cultural and methodological specificity of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences of the University of Insubria, to which the Research Center belongs. These specialist and interdisciplinary skills can be traced back to a method of historical reconstruction that does not only concern human activities in the field of natural sciences and material culture, but also includes environmental history. The proponents have decided to privilege the cultural and proactive plan towards the territory and therefore intend to develop their initiatives in all the centers of the Insubrian University, in order to represent a point of reference in particular for the studies of the history of Earth sciences, particularly in mountain areas, for which there is no similar structure in Italy. The Research Center can also count on many years of experience of collaborations and interactions on the themes it intends to develop and which has seen its members interact with subjects also external to the academic field, such as the Varese section of the Italian Alpine Club (CAI Varese) and other territorial bodies. The Center therefore intends to develop and increase relations with associations, institutes and research centers, universities and public and private bodies at local (in the Province of Varese and Como), regional, national and international levels. The new collaborations will thus be able to contribute to identifying and implementing project methods for the enhancement of the territory, with particular attention to cultural and scientific tourism.