  The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First we review in detail the
geometric aspects of the swampland program for supersymmetric 4d effective
theories using a new and unifying language we dub `domestic geometry', the
generalization of special K\"ahler geometry which does not require the
underlying manifold to be K\"ahler or have a complex structure. All 4d SUGRAs
are described by domestic geometry. As special K\"ahler geometries, domestic
geometries carry formal brane amplitudes: when the domestic geometry describes
the supersymmetric low-energy limit of a consistent quantum theory of gravity,
its formal brane amplitudes have the right properties to be actual branes. The
main datum of the domestic geometry of a 4d SUGRA is its gauge coupling, seen
as a map from a manifold which satisfies the geometric Ooguri-Vafa conjectures
to the Siegel variety; to understand the properties of the quantum-consistent
gauge couplings we discuss several novel aspects of such `Ooguri-Vafa'
manifolds, including their Liouville properties.
  Our second goal is to present some novel speculation on the extension of the
swampland program to no-supersymmetric effective theories of gravity. The idea
is that the domestic geometric description of the quantum-consistent effective
theories extends, possibly with some qualifications, also to the
non-supersymmetric case.
