Italy Map 1640 Decorative Cartouche Print - Rome, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Venice

Melchior Tavernier of Paris made this Carte Generale de l'Italie et des Isles et Pays Circonvoisins, newly drawn after Magini and other authors, and dated it 1640. It is a rare map that appeared in Pierre d'Avity's Nouveau Theatre du Monde. It shows Italy and the surrounding area in detail, with all major rivers, towns, cities and borders labeled, and Italy divided according to its city-states, including the Kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Genoa and Venice. Parts of France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia are also visible. A decorative cartouche carries a note about Tavernier's publishing business and his allegiance to the King of France. The Paris imprint and the date 1640 appear in the title, which makes the sheet easy to place in the long line of French maps of Italy.

A shell holds a scale bar in Italian and French miles. The year 1640 fell in the middle of the Thirty Years War, which finished eight years after the map was completed and placed heavy economic pressure on the peninsula. Seventeenth-century Italy was a long way from unification, with Naples controlled by Spain and parts of the north by the Holy Roman Empire, and several wars alternated this foreign control. Tavernier's map shows how a French publisher of the age saw the divided land. It is a good example of French publishing of the period.

A collector of seventeenth-century French cartography, a family with roots in Florence, Genoa, Venice or Naples, or a reader of early modern history will find a rare gift here. TheMapVault's Sanson map of about 1683 follows this one by a generation, whereas this 1640 sheet is the earlier French view of the same divided peninsula. 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.