France Map 1922 Italian Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Lille

Mario Baratta and Luigi Visintin compiled this Regione Francese for the Grande atlante geografico, published in 1922 in Novara by the Istituto Geografico De Agostini, an atlas of 102 tables of physical, political and economic geography that the publisher counted as the first great Italian atlas. The firm had been founded in Rome in 1901, moved to Novara in 1908 and been taken over by Marco Boroli and Cesare Rossi in 1919, and its color lithographs show a modern press at work. The sheet measures 49 by 39 centimeters on a double page, at 1:2,500,000, with relief in hachures and color, a bar scale in kilometers, a table of départements and an inset of Paris and its surroundings.

All of the labels are in Italian, so the table reads Dipartimenti and the inset Parigi e dintorni, which gives the sheet a distinct voice among French maps. Paris, the capital, had nearly three million people in 1922 and has its own inset, drawn at a larger scale than the country. Strasbourg and the rest of Alsace and Lorraine had been French again since the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The Alpine frontier with Italy carried the Savoy and Nice that Sardinia had ceded to France in 1860, a boundary an Italian publisher naturally drew with care. Together these details show France through the eyes of a neighbor and a victor of the war.

A collector of Italian atlas work, a family with roots in Nice or Savoy, or a traveler between the two countries will find an unusual gift here. TheMapVault's other twentieth-century France sheets, the Bartholomew map of 1955 and the Pergamon map of 1964, are English and Polish productions in later tints, whereas this 1922 sheet is the Italian lithograph, in Italian, drawn from the first decade after the First World War. 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.