Tomorrow is the last day of the 30th International Cartographic Conference (Florence, December 14-18, 2021), which has been organized by the International Cartographic Association and the Italian Association of Cartography in collaboration with the University of Florence, Istituto Geografico Militare, Regione Toscana, Municipality of Florence, and other cultural institutions, including Museo Galileo.
Museo Galileo coordinated the two sessions devoted to the history of cartography, which have been held on Thursday 16 and were chaired by Filippo Camerota, our Scientific Director, and by Angelo Cattaneo, CNR-ISEM researcher and a collaborator of Museo Galileo, respectively. Roberto Ferrari, our Executive Director, attended the opening ceremony in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio on behalf of Florentine cultural institutions.
On the occasion of the Conference, the website devoted to Fra Mauro’s World Map has been launched. The website was the outcome of years-long studies and research of the curators Filippo Camerota and Angelo Cattaneo, with the help of a highly qualified panel of collaborators. It has been built by the Museo Galileo in collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, where the original map is kept.
The monumental map, created around 1450, is one of the most complete and significant representations of the world of that age, and records the geographical novelties and discoveries known in the mid-15th century. It includes over 3000 inscriptions as well as hundreds of toponyms and images of cities, temples, roads, etc.
The website—accessible in Italian, English and Chinese—makes it possible to explore Fra Mauro’s Map in detail and to choose the subjects to go into thoroughly: cosmographic data, geographic coordinates, regions, towns, rivers, mounts, seas, inscriptions. Specific parts deal with subjects such as Venice’s humanistic culture, the representation of the world, cosmography, the relationship between Venice and the sea, the measurement of time and space.
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Useful links