L’Argentina e la Patagonia nella produzione cartografica dei Salesiani

The cartographic representations produced by religious orders are now attested as a scientific source of the forms of production and use of the geographical knowledge realised between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. However, geographical literature has not paid the same attention to the cartography of the religious congregations that arose from the seventeenth century on. Among the best-known insti- tutes, don Bosco’s missionaries were the authors of a large number of cartographic representations developed during their itinerant evan- gelization activities between the colonies of Europeans and the indig- enous tribes of Patagonia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main objective of this contribution is, therefore: to reconstruct the function attributed to cartographic representation in the activi- ties carried out by the Salesians in Argentina and to deconstruct the transformations of the territory which they carried out and fixed in the maps examined. Therefore, the paper first analyses the interest of Italian geographers in the transformative action of the territory and the cartographic contribution of missionaries in contemporary times through a review of their writings on the subject and then, examines four maps made by Don Bosco’s missionaries over a period of approxi- mately fifty years. This gaze made it possible to highlight the particular Salesian pres- ence built on materiality, cultural practices, purposes and strategies that emerge from the cartography itself.