Austrian Empire, Italy & Greece Map 1860 American Atlas Print - Vienna, Rome, Venice, Athens, Valletta

Samuel Augustus Mitchell drew this Map of the Austrian Empire, Italian States, Turkey in Europe, and Greece for Mitchell's New General Atlas, published in Philadelphia in 1860 by his son, S. Augustus Mitchell, Jr. The catalog records a scale of 1:7,500,000 and describes it as full color by nation and internal region, with an inset map of the Maltese Islands and an ornate border. The sheet belongs to the first edition and first state of the atlas, which replaced the New Universal Atlas and continued in print until 1893. It shows the eastern Mediterranean as a patchwork of empires and small states. The sheet measures 34 centimeters wide and 27 tall, and the atlas it comes from holds forty-seven quarto maps within a series of seventy-six maps and plans.

The year 1860 was a hinge for the lands on this sheet. Italy was still divided into separate states, and within twelve months Garibaldi's campaign and the plebiscites would bring most of them under one crown, while the Austrian Empire still held Venetia and ruled from Vienna. Greece was a young kingdom, and Turkey in Europe remained the Ottoman Empire's largest holding on the continent. Malta, in the inset, was a British possession whose capital Valletta commanded the central Mediterranean. A map that colors each nation and its internal regions captures that moment with unusual clarity, just before the political map of Italy was redrawn.

A reader of Risorgimento history, a family with roots in Italy, Austria, Greece or Malta, or a collector of American atlas maps will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's Colton sheets of 1856 show the Italian states from the same decade, whereas this Mitchell sheet of 1860 places them beside the empires that surrounded them. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.