The Travelling Maps exhibition had its origin in the Third Mission project entitled Moving Knowledge/Mobility Expo, organised by Giada Peterle for the Museum of Geography and supported by an interdisciplinary scientific committee headed by the University of Padova’s MoHu Centre. The project’s chief objective is to circulate among a wide public the reflections on issues of mobility raised by ongoing research at the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World that forms part of the Mobility & Humanities Excellence Project.

Driven by the topicality of issues related to mobility in research and contemporary society, the Moving Knowledge/Mobility Expo project envisages the Museum of Geography as a cultural hub, a meeting place in which to promote research and to raise the profile of the University’s heritage by means of a dialogue between science and art, exhibitions, workshops and events, both physical and digital.

Travelling Maps began life as a temporary exhibition held in the Museum of Geography's Hall of Music on 4 December 2021. The occasion celebrated the second anniversary of the museum and the launch of Armando Morbiato’s book L’incanto del viaggiatore: Diari (1957–1967) e ricordi di un emigrante (The Enchantment of the Traveller: Diaries (1957–1967) and Memories of an Emigrant) in the presence of the author. In the book the benefactor recalls the ten momentous years of his life in which he travelled the length and breadth of the earth not so much out of necessity as for the irrepressible desire he had to know first-hand the world of which he would go on to collect extraordinary graphic representations. And the exhibition takes inspiration from these movements of people and objects in space and time and makes them available in a digital environment. Travelling Maps has now been redesigned and adapted to the internet with the aim of bringing into permanent dialogue not only those who were able to visit the exhibition in person but also the online public.