Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy

In one of his Letters of Old Age from 1367–68, Petrarch observed that while travel added something to his experience and knowledge of things, it had diminished his knowledge of literature by keeping him away from his study. Indeed, neither hardships at sea nor perils would have kept him from traveling even “to the ends of the earth, to China and the Indies, and . . . the most distant land of Taprobane” if it had not been for his fear of losing time with his books. But then Petrarch discovered a novel technique for satisfying his Ulyssean desire for travel and knowledge while staying at home: “Therefore I decided not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or horse or on foot to those lands, but many times on a tiny map, with books and the imagination, so that in the course of an hour I could go to those shores and return as many times as I liked . . . not only unscathed, but unwearied too, not only with sound body, but with no wear and tear to my shoes, untouched by briars, stones, mud and dust.”1 Petrarch’s celebration of the pleasures of virtual travel on maps in the fourteenth century, perhaps the first in modern literary history, represents a characteristic expression of his humanism, which was rooted in new geographical knowledge culled from rediscovered classical sources as well as from the poet’s own experiences of travel. Significantly, during the same period that witnessed the earliest Atlantic discoveries, Petrarch exhibited a strong awareness of contemporary cartography, in particular of modern portolan charts, and likely had direct contact with some of the leading cartographers of the time, including the Pizzigani family in Venice.2 Petrarch’s authority for geographical and cartographic knowledge was such that his humanist successors in the Renaissance, including Flavio Biondo (“Italia illustrata,” 1453) and Leandro Alberti (Descrittione di tutta Italia, 1550), credited him with authorship of the first modern map of Italy.3 More than 150 years later, in 1518, at the culminating moment of an even more momentous geographical and technological transition, the greatest poet of the Italian Renaissance, Lodovico Ariosto, expressed, in a passage from his third satire patently inspired by Petrarch, his own resistance to travel and evoked virtual travel on maps as its antidote: “Let him wander who desires to wander. Let him see England, Hungary, France, and Spain. I am content to live in my native land. I have seen Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Romagna, and the mountain range that divides Italy, and the one that locks her in, and both the seas that wash her. And that is quite enough for me. Without ever paying an innkeeper, I will go exploring the rest of the earth with Ptolemy, whether the world be at peace or else at war. Without ever making vows when the heavens flash with lightning, I will go bounding over all the seas, more secure aboard my maps than aboard ships.”4 For both Petrarch and Ariosto, the map enabled the imagination of the poet and of the literary scholar to establish an intellectual and artistic dominion over the world while staying at home. Eventually, travel on maps became a characteristic form of literary compensation in Italy. Failing to achieve any form of national political unification during the Renaissance, Italy can be said to have been left at home by the rapidly developing history of early modern colonial travel. But virtual travel on maps represents just one aspect of the complex and largely unexplored question of the impact of the cartographic revolution on literature in Italy. While centuries of scholarship have been dedicated to the literature connected to the discoveries and cartography of the Renaissance, scant attention has focused on the impact of contemporary mapping on Italian literature. While the topic has come into clearer view for France and England, where the links between cartography and literature have received renewed attention as part of a general cultural reassessment of the emergence of the modern colonial nation-state, this schol-