The revival of geopolitics in post 1989 Italy is at once a rather straighforward and perplexing matter. On the one band, the renewed appeal that geopolitical thinking has enjoyed in international relations circles has been well documented and could bardly be downplayed. On the other band, however the recourse to geopolitics has often boiled down to an undifferentiated and ofen convoluted use of its terms, approaches and theories. In this article we argue that tha rationale of such a revival has been less to import geopolitical knowledge into IR and more to confer legitimacy and respectability to the analyses put forward by scholars and practitióners. It is no chance, in fact, that the geopolitics-inspired academic discourse has been progressively recognised as a way, if not the way, to discuss international affairs in post - 1989 Italy. The central puzzle to be investigated behind the revival of geopolitics in Italy is thus how such a discourse has managed to again and retain a powerful status in italian IR academia and, most importantly, why