Italy Map 1922 Physical Atlas Print - Rome, Milan, Naples, Venice, Palermo

Mario Baratta and Luigi Visintin made this Italia: Carta fisica for the Grande atlante geografico, which the Istituto Geografico De Agostini of Novara published in 1922 in 102 sheets of physical, political and economic geography. It is a color lithograph at a scale of 1:3,000,000, with relief shown by hachures and color, a legend, graticule lines and a bar scale in kilometers. The sheet is a physical map, showing topography, drainage, coastlines, islands and water depths. The Alps and Apennines stand out in browns and oranges, the surrounding seas in blue, and the Po, the Tiber, Lake Garda and Lake Como are marked. The sheet measures 52 by 38 centimeters within a larger page of 54 by 40, and it appears in the second volume of the atlas, which has 102 tables of geography with 250 maps and sketch maps.

Published in Novara, this was an Italian atlas made for Italian readers, and its emphasis on mountains, rivers and seas reflects the school geography of the early twentieth century. Sicily and Sardinia are clearly drawn, and the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Mediterranean waters are shown with depth variations. Italy in 1922 had just emerged from the First World War with new borders in the north and east, and the geography of the peninsula was a favorite subject of national pride. De Agostini, founded in 1901, had by then become one of the leading publishers of geographical works in the country.

A lover of physical geography, a family with roots anywhere between the Alps and Sicily, or a collector of Italian twentieth-century atlas cartography will find a fine gift here. TheMapVault's Polish-compiled Pergamon sheet of 1967 shows the same peninsula in red and pale tints, whereas this 1922 De Agostini sheet is the Italian view in hachures. 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.