By Elizabeth Vasile
Genius Loci is a Latin term, meaning spirit of place. Geographers, historians, and other scholars use it to refer to that element, or quality, or founding principle, that makes a place uniquely itself, that pervades or gives rise to, as a spirit would, all that takes place in an area. One might think of it as a geographic genome.
For San Francisco as a whole, a unique combination of conditions came together in the early days, to form a local spirit that might be called "tolerance, innovation, and testing the limits".
Fonte: L'italo-Americano