Mapping Italy in Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio

Historians of cartography have, generally speaking, tended to focus in their studies on the early modern geographical image of the Italian peninsula that became current following the reintroduction of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography in Florence around 1400. This perspective overlooks the fact that various forms of cartographic writing in both poetic and prose genres had effectively fulfilled a cartographic function well before the mechanical reproduction of texts and images made possible the wide dissemination of maps. This lecture presents a tripartite survey that begins to explore the ways in which Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio made canonical contributions to the cartographic invention of Italy and the Mediterranean already during the Trecento, well before the rediscovery of Ptolemy.