Maps and GIS for middle school: my work for Zanichelli
I am a freelance cartographer: I create maps on commission for public institutions, organizations, publishers and companies. MountainCarto is where everything I have learned — and the passion for the mountains that brought me here — comes together in cartographic products made for those who love the mountains, not only for those who study, manage or promote them.
In this blog I also occasionally write about the most significant commissioned projects I work on alongside the shop. This is one of them.
Between late 2025 and early 2026 I collaborated with Zanichelli — one of Italy's leading educational publishers — on three distinct fronts: the creation of three wall maps (World, Europe, Italy), designed for classroom use but independent from the book; reference maps to be included in middle school geography volumes; and a series of introductory lessons on GIS and digital cartography, with practical activities and videos, integrated directly into the texts. It is the kind of commission that leaves something behind: in technique, in method, and also in the shop — as we will see.
The books I contributed to are part of the series Paesaggi vicini e lontani by Carla Tondelli, a geography course for middle school.
The wall maps
The most visible part of the work is the three wall maps: World, Europe and Italy. These are physical maps designed to be displayed in the classroom, accompanying the textbooks during lessons.
Those who look carefully will recognise something familiar: the shaded relief, the colour palette, the way the morphology of the territory is rendered are the same as in MountainCarto maps. That is inevitable — and I consider it a result, not a coincidence.
For the Europe and World maps I used data from Natural Earth — an outstanding resource for small-scale cartography, as it provides data already selected and generalised for this type of work. For the World map in particular I started from the Equal Earth map, one of the most successful world maps of recent years, replacing its colour background with my own rendering and revising other graphic elements. For the Italy map I worked with more heterogeneous sources, applying selection and generalisation techniques case by case: a more laborious process, but necessary to do justice to such a complex territory.
The maps for the book
Alongside the wall maps, for the volumes of Paesaggi vicini e lontani I produced a series of reference maps: Italian macro-regions, European states, world regions. Small, but not simple — at that scale every typographic and colour choice carries double the weight.
The GIS educational path
The part that involved me the most, however, is something else. Alongside the maps I wrote a series of introductory lessons on GIS and digital cartography, spread across the three years of middle school, with practical activities and explanatory videos. The title of the course is Esplorare, mappare, condividere (Explore, map, share).
The core idea is that students should not only learn to read maps, but understand how they are made — and above all how they can make one themselves.
First year — Introduction to GIS
The theory introduces the concept of a Geographic Information System starting from examples the students already know: navigation apps, weather forecasts, public transport. The practical lessons take the class outside: each student records a walk around their neighbourhood using the CoMaps app, exports the track in GPX format and shares it with the teacher. Back in class, all the tracks are visualised together on geojson.io, creating a collective map of the class's everyday routes.
Second year — Introduction to OpenStreetMap
This is where the theme of participatory mapping comes in. Students go out with a printed map of their neighbourhood — generated with Field Papers — and annotate it by hand: bins, benches, bus stops, pedestrian crossings. Back in class they enter the collected data directly into OpenStreetMap using the iD editor. Their contributions become part of the world map.
I have a particular attachment to OpenStreetMap, for both professional and personal reasons. OSM data is an integral part of my daily work as a cartographer; but there is something more: contributing to building and maintaining a collective map of the entire world — and then using that same data to navigate in the mountains — is one of those things that never stops being rewarding.
Third year — Web cartography
The final year broadens the view to interactive maps. The theory introduces the concept of WebGIS with concrete examples. The practical activity is an excursion in a natural environment: students collect a GPS track and thematic points of interest, then build with uMap their first interactive map published online.
For all three years I also produced explanatory videos to guide teachers and students through the practical activities — one of which can be viewed directly on the book's page on the Zanichelli website.
From Zanichelli to MountainCarto
There is a thread connecting this work to the shop. Working on the physical maps for Zanichelli — particularly the Italy map — gave me the opportunity to refine certain stylistic choices and engage with a broader territory than the alpine peaks I usually work with. That work led directly to the Carta Montagne d'Italia, already available in the shop.
A new addition is likely coming soon: a physical map of Europe in the MountainCarto style, bringing to the shop the same attention to relief that went into the school wall maps.
A cartographic project in the works?
Public institutions, organisations and companies are welcome to contact me for consultancy and commissions of any kind. Get in touch via the contact page.