Geografia dell’Africa

Geografia dell’Africa

Geography of Africa

Livio Sanuta’s Geografia dell’Africa contains 12 two-page black and white maps, sketched by Livio and engraved by his brother Giulio, depicting Africa and its surrounding waters from a variety of perspectives. Published in Venice in 1588, this book, including its maps, builds on foundational trends in Venetian cartography. Because the Venetian economy depended on maritime trade, much of Venetian cartography, beginning with the creation of portolan charts, focused on waterways. Eventually, by the sixteenth century, during Sanuto’s lifetime, hydrographic mapping took hold as cartographers sought to map river channels and systems for the purpose of environmental planning. Giacomo Gastaldi’s topologically-focused Map of 1564 presents the southern tip of Africa’s hydrographical system and inspired Sanuto’s maps shortly after.

Like Gastaldi, Sanuto sought to depict as many of Africa’s geographical features as possible based on eye witness accounts, rather than simply treating Ptolemy’s Geography, a dominant text at the time, as incontestable. Maps one through 11 of Sanuto’s work capture specific regions of Africa, and five of those maps depict different sections of the Mediterranean Sea and the African coastline. The other six maps depict snapshots of other corners of Africa. The twelfth map depicts Africa as a whole. Due to Sanuto’s geographic focus, hills and mountain ranges symbolized by bumplike shapes litter this map, although the difference in size among the symbols is somewhat unclear. Sanuto also depicts rivers, which appear on the map as lines. Each of the rivers are labeled in Italian, as are the surrounding seas, in addition to some of the cities and larger regions. Sanuto concentrates most of his labels and geographic features in the top of his map though, causing some of the labels to almost blend in with the geographic symbols. The surrounding areas of the map primarily depict the ocean, which is represented by a collection of faint dots, and a few sketches of ships and sea monsters. It also includes some labeled islands.

In the 11 more zoomed in maps, the mountain ranges and waterways become much clearer, as do their labels, as they no longer overlap. Some of these maps also include port labels, sketches of volcanoes, and sketches of manmade structures, such as castles or clusters of teepees. Additionally, because these maps cover smaller areas, Sanuto varies the sizes of his symbols more, making the difference in size among mountain ranges particularly noticeable. He also adds some indistinguishable clusters of symbols that could represent different types of vegetation. Though maps one through 11 include more details than the twelfth map, Sanuto emphasizes the same primary geographic features across all the maps, and each map contains some form of scale marker, in addition to labeled latitude lines, reflecting the increasing focus on geography and proportion in sixteenth century Venetian cartography. Overall, these maps, and the text that follows in the rest of the Geografia, seek to highlight places of interest in Africa and to describe cities and the people living within them.

(Piper Brown 2025)

Livio Sanuto

Giulio Sanuto

Sanuto, Livio. Geografia dell’Africa. Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1588.

Atlas

Sanuto, Livio. Geografia dell’Africa: Venice 1588. Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1965.

1588

Engraving

Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN

Italian

Atlas

Africa

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