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Event Details

Tue, April 18, 2017

18:00 – 19:30

VILLA LA PIETRA
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Firenze, Italy

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.

 

Featured Biographies

Theodore J. Cachey Jr.

PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, INAUGURAL ACADEMIC DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME ROME GLOBAL GATEWAY

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also the director of the William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies (http://dante.nd.edu), and co-director of Italian Studies (https://italianstudies.nd.edu). Since 2015 he has been the Inaugural Academic Director of the Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway, based in Rome. He has published on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio; the history of Italian language; the history and literature of travel; the relationship between cartography and literature.