Southern Italy Map 1831 First Edition Atlas Print - Naples, Palermo, Cagliari, Messina

John Dower drew and engraved this South Italy for Henry Teesdale & Co., which published it in London in 1831 in the first edition of A New General Atlas of the World. The sheet is about 41 by 34 centimeters at a scale of 1:2,400,000, and it is an outline hand-colored map showing administrative divisions, cities, towns and roads, with relief in hachures. The main map covers the peninsula from Naples south to Calabria and the islands of Sicily, and an inset in the left margin gives an enlarged view of Sardinia with its divisions, towns and roads. The bold title stands in the lower right, with a scale in English miles. The catalog advises comparing this first edition with the 1836 and 1844 editions that followed it.

The coloring in blue, yellow, green and pink picks out the provinces, and the Greenwich prime meridian places the map within the British scientific tradition. In 1831 the south of the peninsula was largely the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, under Bourbon rule, and Sardinia was a separate island territory. The Teesdale atlas had been drawn expressly for the work and compiled from the latest authorities, English and foreign. Later editions dropped Dower's name from the title page but kept it on the maps, and Tanner of Philadelphia borrowed from the 1836 edition in his own atlas.

A collector of first-edition atlas maps, a family with roots in Naples, Sicily or Sardinia, or a lover of Mediterranean history will find a handsome gift here. TheMapVault's Orr sheet of 1832 and its Colton sheets of 1856 and 1859 show the same south in other hands, whereas this 1831 sheet is the earliest in the group and the most austere. 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.