California Italian Studies

This article discusses the emergence of Italy as a discrete object in the Mediterranean in the history of Western cartography. In particular, it focuses on different coexisting Renaissance mapping traditions that rested on two opposed spatial understandings and experiences of the basin: on the one hand, as a functional region and a sequence of interconnected places grounded in an older Ancient and Medieval tradition of itineraries, mappae mundi and portolan charts; on the other, as a compact geographical area defined by forms and dimensions (through Ptolemaic chorographic mapping). These two different spatial understandings persist in contemporary debates about the nature of the Mediterranean region. The latter can be likened to the “great Mediterranean body,” or formal organic unit conceived by Braudel. The former is a vision “from the sea” in line with the “functional” approach recently proposed by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, who portray the Mediterranean as a space made of coastal flows and connectivities between “microregions.”