Italy Map 1904 German Atlas Print - Rome, Naples, Turin, Messina, Milan

This Italien is map number 21 in Stielers Hand-Atlas, which Justus Perthes of Gotha published in a ninth edition of one hundred copper-engraved maps. The sheet is credited to Adolf Stieler with C. Vogel and O. Koffmahn, measures about 43 by 37 centimeters, and carries a scale of 1:3,700,000. The catalog describes it as an outline-colored map with relief shown in hachures, engraved by E. Kuehn, M. Kern and A. Kramer. Insets are given for Neapel, Turin, Messina, Roma and Aetna, so that four cities and Mount Etna appear in closer view beside the main map. The ninth edition of the atlas was completely newly engraved, and the catalog notes that its alphabetical index was not scanned, so the sheet stands as the map alone.

The hachures bring out the Alps in the north and the Apennines running down the peninsula, and the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seas are tinted a pale blue. Rome, Naples, Turin and Messina are the cities highlighted in the catalog description. The Italy of 1904 had been unified for more than forty years, and the capital was Rome, yet Messina was still a prosperous Sicilian port, four years before the great earthquake of 1908. Perthes of Gotha was the German authority on printed geography, and the sheet shows why, with its fine engraving and its density of detail. The sheet gives a reader the whole country at a glance, with detail added where it matters.

A collector of German atlas cartography, a family with roots in Turin, Naples or Sicily, or an admirer of Mount Etna will find a distinctive gift here. TheMapVault's De Agostini sheet of 1922 offers the Italian view of the same country, whereas this 1904 Stieler is the German one, with its city insets around the edge. 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.