Sky in the Room: Maps from Quarantine

This article aims to present and discuss the main results of an exercise carried out as part of a university course in Human Geography, which took place online in the period March-May 2020. Following the urge to represent the space perceived in the quarantine due to the lockdown period caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, about fifty students made themselves available to tell, through mental mapping, the transformations of their pre- and post-epidemic experience. After a brief introduction on the theoretical bases and the motivations of this specific assignment, we will analyze the elements highlighted by the students trying to offer a critical and contextual reading of how the subjective and contingent conditions interact with the relationships with the living space. The mental maps produced, therefore, will become the narrative tool to offer a reading of the time and space of modification in this particular and unprecedented situation. This condition has transformed external stimuli into mental contents by placing an emphasis on the relationships between individual and territory, relationships and perceptions of space.