Il paesaggio della Riviera ligure nei portolani e nelle narrazioni ottocentesche

Sailing directions (or Pilot books) and nautical cartography represent important sources for recon-structing the historical coastal landscape and for analyzing the evolution of urban centers and their ports, especially if compared with coeval books. This research wants to offer an overview of the main features of the Ligurian coast from the point of view of the sailor, therefore from the sea, as they have been described from the nineteenth century scholars and captains before the territorial transformations produced by industrializa-tion and mass tourism. For the analysis of the ports and coastal areas, some travel reports were compared with the pilot books of Giuseppe Albini and Luigi Lamberti. The selection of the case studies is based on the nautical cartography produced by Albini and it was developed through a storytelling which virtually follows a route from west to east.