Southern Italy Map 1856 Kingdom of Naples Atlas Print - Naples, Palermo, Cagliari, Valletta

George W. Colton drew Southern Italy: Kingdom of Naples, I. Sardinia & Malta for Colton's Atlas of the World, which J. H. Colton & Co. of 172 William Street, New York, issued in 1856 as map number 19. The catalog gives a scale of 1:1,900,800 and describes full color within an ornate border, with an inset of Malta and its Dependencies. Mountains, rivers and coastlines are marked, and cities, towns and settlements are labeled. The text of the atlas was written by Richard Swainson Fisher, and this one-volume 1856 edition is scarcer than the two-volume version that preceded it. The sheet is 41 centimeters wide and 34 tall, with the New York imprint and the number 19 printed in the margin, and the atlas was bound in quarter leather with the title stamped in gold.

Colton first published the atlas by subscription and in parts, and it stayed in print for more than thirty years, so it became one of the best-known American atlases of its day. The Kingdom of Naples, the largest of the pre-unification states, occupied the whole south of the peninsula, and Sardinia and Malta, both included, held strategic positions in the Mediterranean. Five years after this map was issued the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, which gives the sheet the feel of a snapshot taken just before the old order vanished. The ornate border is typical of 1850s American mapmaking.

A collector of Colton atlas maps, a family with roots in Naples, Sicily, Sardinia or Malta, or a reader of Risorgimento history will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's later Colton Southern Italy of 1859 shows the same region with railroads and a revised coloring, whereas this 1856 sheet is the earlier one-volume edition. 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.