«La famosa questione delle acque». Cosimo De Giorgi, l'idrogeologia e il problema dell'irrigazione in Puglia (1867-1922)

The interest in hydrogeology by Cosimo De Giorgi (1842-1922), an Apulian intellectual, physician and scientist with an erudite training, offers some relevant insights on the emergence and consolidation of this peculiar discipline in the social, economic and cultural context of the Mezzogiorno, between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.His activity, strongly focused on understanding groundwater circulation in the province of Terra d'Otranto, was always related to the sphere of powers and social-productive conflicts generated by different hypotheses and forms of water use. In a cultural climate suspended between idealism and positivism, De Giorgi's research was characterized by practical and productivist approaches and aimed at annexing geological and hydrographic local features within well-defined territorial identity representations.While remaining firmly confined to a local dimension, his scientific career as a hydrogeologist offered a mediation between the local and the national, unfolding from the first surveys for the Geological Map of Italy, carried out at the end of the 1870s, to the appointment within the Royal Commission for Irrigation, commissioned in 1910 by the Luzzatti government.