Services and games to facilitate the culture of the area in 2020

‘Have some serious fun,’ said the Eames, between furniture designs that would go round the world. We, too, propose a few sofa games to play using AtlasFor, waiting for the greater pleasure, to take us around the world, with our atlas in hand, to add more pleasure to our visits.

Staying at home, we have discovered that, as Raffestin wrote, the sense of landscape is a nostalgia, a longing for a feeling that we can no longer have, either because the places that generated that emotion have disappeared, or because we cannot go there.

Now that we take our first timid steps outside our homes, we realise that having experienced that nostalgia has changed the way we enjoy the city and the culture spread across the territory. It is a strong feeling for some, fleeting for others, but if we grasp it with due attention, we may be able to better appreciate magnificent places and aspects of the urban landscape within reach but never considered.

But to achieve these positive results, induced by the forced detachment from everyday life, we must equip ourselves.

We must change our gaze: train ourselves to serendipity, to take pleasure in the unexpected, to discover new things in places we think we know because we look at them, without seeing them, every day.

And, on the other hand, we need to induce those in charge to change the way culture is presented to us in the city, overcoming this phase in which the media spotlights are all focused on the ‘classic’ or ‘hit’ hits of the moment, and succeeding in shining the widespread warp of cultural assets and landscapes that makes the entire fabric of large and small centres and their territories precious in Italy.

Therefore, for spring 2020 AtlasFor proposes games and services to experience and refine our relationship with our closest cultural landscape. On the one hand, playful explorations to be done from home, stimulating curiosity and the pleasure of discovery in our cities (starting with Genoa and Turin); on the other hand, a system of itineraries and reservations to showcase and facilitate safe access to the widespread heritage scattered throughout the territory.

We are dedicating this issue of ATLASFOR MAGAZINE to the first trials of these experiments, in the conviction that they can help people better appreciate and facilitate access to places within reach but never considered, and in the hope that summer 2020 may also become memorable for a new way of enjoying our heritage and caring for our visitors, helping us to overcome the pain and bewilderment of so many deaths and illnesses.

PS: Give us a hand… invent new games to play with AtlasFor, tell us (with pictures and words, in the style of AtlasFor) about wonderful little-known places, suggest ways to improve access and knowledge of our treasures: write to info@landscapefor.eu