Marseille Map 1870 City Plan Print - Old Port, La Canebière, Notre-Dame de la Garde

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published this plan of Marseille in London in 1870, and the catalog describes it as a highly detailed town plan and one of the best maps of Marseille published in a commercial atlas in the nineteenth century. The Society, founded in London in 1826, produced inexpensive maps to encourage broad use in education, and its city plans are the ones that collectors seek for their detail. The sheet is a later issue in the series, a generation after the Society's first plan of the city. It shows Marseille in 1870, a Mediterranean port that had been transformed by the opening of the Suez Canal the year before, and the year of the Franco-Prussian War.

A city plan of this date covers a Marseille that had outgrown its old harbor, the Old Port, which Greek settlers had used since the founding of Massilia. In the decades before 1870 the city had added new docks to the north of the old harbor, a broad new street cut through the old town, and the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde on the hill above, consecrated in 1864. The Suez Canal made Marseille the natural French gateway to the East, and the port handled the trade in grain, oil, soap and colonial goods that supported a growing population. The plan therefore records a city that was changing faster than its old street pattern could hold. Taken together, these facts make the sheet a portrait of Marseille at the start of its imperial boom.

A traveler who has walked the Old Port, a family from Provence, or a collector of French city plans will find a lively gift here. TheMapVault's 1840 Marseille plan is the Society's earlier engraving, made before the new docks and the Suez Canal, whereas this 1870 sheet is the later one, drawn for a city that had become the gateway to the East. The same Society's 1832 and 1870 plans of Bordeaux show the other great port of the French coast. 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.