Northern Italy Map 1831 First Edition Atlas Print - Milan, Venice, Turin, Genoa, Florence

John Dower drew and engraved this North Italy, which Henry Teesdale & Co. of London published in 1831 in the first edition of A New General Atlas of the World, an atlas also known as Teesdale's Atlas. The sheet measures about 41 by 34 centimeters at a scale of 1:2,600,000 and is an outline hand-colored map showing administrative divisions, cities, towns and roads, with relief drawn in hachures. It reaches from the borders of Switzerland and Austria in the north to Tuscany and part of the Papal States in the south, and includes Corsica in the southwest. A title at lower left sits above a scale of English miles, sixty to a degree. The catalog advises comparing this first edition with the 1836 and 1844 editions that followed it.

Colored outlines separate Lombardy, Venetia, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia and Tuscany, and the denser settlement of the Po Valley stands out against the Alps. The Po, the Adige and Lake Garda are the prominent waters. The prime meridian is Greenwich, in keeping with British practice, and a geometric tick border is the only decoration. Later editions of the atlas dropped Dower's name from the title page, though it stayed on the maps. Printed a generation before unification, the sheet records the states as the Congress of Vienna had left them. The sheet therefore serves as a clear political record of the north before the railways and revolutions of mid-century.

A collector of English atlas maps, a family with roots in Piedmont, Lombardy or Liguria, or a reader of Risorgimento history will find an elegant gift here. TheMapVault's Orr sheet of 1832 shows the same region from a rival publisher, whereas this 1831 Teesdale sheet is the first-edition version, drawn and signed by Dower himself. 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.