The time of COVID-19 lockdown has given us an opportunity to practice experimental methodologies of cultural geography. I use early-20th-century Polish guides to Rome, Italy, to provide exercises in auto-geography. The aim of these exercises is to enrich the practice of cultural geography by opening up to self-exploration and combining lectures and imagination with distanced spaces. These exercises relate to finding the hidden narrator, understanding locational formulations, and assessing the role of our own assumptions and memories in studying urban narratives. Although travel guides are typically read as sources of historical and cultural knowledge, I propose also reading them to better understand the relationship between reading practice and the researcher’s prior knowledge.

COVID-19锁定的时间使我们有机会实践文化地理学的实验方法。我使用20世纪初的波兰指南前往意大利罗马，以提供自动地理练习。这些练习的目的是通过开放自我探索，并将演讲和想象力与遥远的空间相结合，丰富文化地理学的实践。这些练习涉及寻找隐藏的叙述者，理解位置的表述以及评估我们自己的假设和记忆在研究城市叙事中的作用。尽管通常将旅行指南视为历史和文化知识的来源，但我还是建议阅读它们以更好地理解阅读实践与研究人员的先验知识之间的关系。