Ancient Italy Map 1903 Classical Atlas Print - Rome, Naples, Syracuse, Taranto

Heinrich Kiepert drew Italiae pars media for his Atlas antiquus, twelve maps of ancient history that Dietrich Reimer of Berlin published in 1903. The sheet shows central Italy in the classical period at a scale of 1:1,250,000, with relief drawn in hachures and the prime meridians of Paris and Greenwich both marked. It is a single-color lithograph, with boundaries picked out in yellow, blue, red and orange. Several insets accompany the main map: Magna Graecia sive Italia Inferior cum Sicilia, dated to the eighth to fifth centuries before Christ, plus plans of Syracusae and Neapolis and a view of Latium antiquissimum. The map measures 44 centimeters wide and 36 tall, and the atlas it belongs to, twelve maps in all, was designed for scholarly study of the ancient world.

Kiepert was the leading German historical cartographer of his day, and the names on this sheet are in Latin, as a scholar of the ancient world would have expected. The insets reach from Latium, the cradle of Rome, to the Greek colonies of the south, where Neapolis, now Naples, and Syracuse were founded by settlers from across the sea. Together they trace the road from the first villages of the Tiber to the cities of Magna Graecia that Rome later absorbed. Because it was designed for teaching, the map pairs academic precision with a quiet single-color elegance, and the hachures give the Apennines real weight.

A teacher of Latin or ancient history, a family with roots in Rome, Naples or Sicily, or a collector of German scholarly cartography will find a thoughtful gift here. TheMapVault's American school sheet of 1835 and its Mitchell sheet of 1875 show the same ancient peninsula, but this Kiepert print of 1903 is the most exact, with its Greek-colony insets. 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.