Walking the Madonie: Laboratorio del Cammino Summer School 2025

The Laboratorio del Cammino is an inter-university network of researchers and teachers who study walking as a way of reading and planning territory. Bilkent LAUD is one of its partner departments, alongside universities across Italy, and takes part in its itinerant summer school each year. Faculty member Hatice Karaca, who also sits on the network's scientific committee, and instructor Banu Aksel Gürün represented the department in the 2025 edition.

This year's school, "Enable Madonie," moved on foot through the Madonie, a mountainous internal area of northern Sicily. Over roughly ten days the group walked from Geraci Siculo down to the coast at Cefalù, passing through Petralia Sottana, Collesano, Gratteri, Isnello and Castelbuono, covering between ten and twenty kilometres a day.

Walking became the method itself. Reading the territory through the lens of cultural ecosystem services, participants met inhabitants and local actors along the way and produced situated, collective readings of these so-called peripheral areas, translating what they saw and heard into diary-maps and instant reports that reframe how internal territories and the relationship between people and nature can be understood.