The 1482 edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’ is only the third atlas ever printed and one of the rarest of the Ptolemy editions. It was printed in Florence by Francesco Berlinghieri (1440-1501) at a time when the city was ruled by the Medici family headed by the great Lorenzo de’ Medici. The first printed edition of Ptolemy’s classical second century atlas was in Bologna in 1477. A Rome edition followed in 1478. What makes this printing unique is that they are the first and only ones to be printed according to Ptolemy’s original design, that being on a plane projection with equidistant longitude and latitude lines. Most other editions use a trapezoidal projection. The text is notable for being a metrical rhyming paraphrase of Ptolemy, and the first written in Italian. The engraving is believed to be the work of the great engraver Francesco Rosselli. As Woodward wrote ‘the roots of the map trade in the Italian states can be traced to Florence, where the enterprise centred around the painter and miniaturist Francesco Rosselli, probably the first entrepreneur to be successful in making an independent living from the print and map trade’. There is some question to that attribution by Hind as it appears that Rosselli was not in Italy from 1480-82.

This fine example is of Ptolemy’s central Asia and displays the Caspian Sea to the west. It focuses on the extremely important Silk Road, the famous route to the east that Marco Polo undertook. This was the traditional trading route between the Mediterranean and Asia. This region today encompasses Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Campbell 143; Dalché (2007) ‘The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century’ in ‘The History of Cartography’ volume 3 part 1 pp. 285-364; Nordenskiold Collection 198 no. 23; Roberts, Sean ‘Poet and ‘World Painter’: Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia 1482′ in ‘Imago Mundi’ no. 62 pt. 2 pp. 145-60; Shirley ‘Atlases in the British Library’ T.Ptol 4a; Woodward ‘Earliest Printed Maps’ pp. 124-8; Woodward ‘History of Cartography’ vol. 3 pt. 1 pp. 321-3 & 773-4.