Piero Falchetta (born 1951) is an Italian cartographer, writer and translator. He is head of the department of ancient maps at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and a specialist of medieval travel writing, history of cartography and history of navigation. He currently lives in his native Venice. One of his most recent contributions to medieval cartography is a critical edition of Fra Mauro's World Map, published in 2006. Recent contributions to the history of navigation are the essays on Michael of Rhodes' nautical writings, [1] and the edition of Benedetto Cotrugli's treatise De navigatione (1464–65). He is also the author of literary essays and translations. [2] His most notable translation is La scomparsa (1995) Italian translation on Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition (1969) (English translation A Void , 1994), which was awarded the 1996 Leone Traverso debut prize in the Monselice Literary Prize. [3] [2]
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.
Ahmed Muhiddin Piri, better known as Piri Reis, was an Ottoman admiral, navigator, geographer and cartographer. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye, a book that contains detailed information on early navigational techniques as well as relatively accurate charts for their time, describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea.
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory, and Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Antonio Pigafetta was a Venetian scholar and explorer. He joined the expedition to the Spice Islands led by explorer Ferdinand Magellan under the flag of King Charles I of Spain and after Magellan's death in the Philippines, the subsequent voyage around the world. During the expedition, he served as Magellan's assistant and kept an accurate journal, which later assisted him in translating the Cebuano language. It is the first recorded document concerning the language.
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist
The Fra Mauro map is a map of the world made around 1450 by the Italian cartographer Fra Mauro, which is “considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography." It is a circular planisphere drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame that measures over two by two meters. It includes Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic. It is oriented with south at the top.
"Here be dragons" means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
Monselice is a town and municipality (comune) located in northeastern Italy, in the Veneto region, in the province of Padua.
The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map, which would remain authoritative throughout the Middle Ages.
Kyriakos Charalambides is one of the most renowned and celebrated living Cypriot poets. His poetry, essays, translations, and critical analysis celebrate the ideas of Western civilisation, expressed through the language and history of Greek culture. His poetic opus adds to the tradition established by such modern Greek poets as Constantine P. Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis. His poetry though holds steadfastly to the Greek Cypriot linguistic register.
The Geography, also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazetteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Claudius Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around AD 150, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation into Arabic in the 9th century and Latin in 1406 was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the medieval Caliphate and Renaissance Europe.
Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions, which have been noted for their high cartographic accuracy. The word portolan comes from the Italian portulano, meaning "related to ports or harbors", and which since at least the 17th century designates "a collection of sailing directions".
David Abulafia, is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, rising to become a professor at the age of 50. He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board. He is a visiting Professor at the College of Europe.
Gianni Celati is an Italian writer, translator and literary critic.
"Majorcan cartographic school" is the term coined by historians to refer to the collection of predominantly Jewish cartographers, cosmographers and navigational instrument-makers and some Christian associates that flourished in Majorca in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries until the expulsion of the Jews. The label is usually inclusive of those who worked in Catalonia. The Majorcan school is frequently contrasted with the contemporary Italian cartography school.
Christopher Whyte is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and an innovative and controversial critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic also appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.
A rutter is a mariner's handbook of written sailing directions. Before the advent of nautical charts, rutters were the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation.
Tom Clark Conley is an American philologist. He is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. He and his wife Verena are Faculty Deans of Kirkland House.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. Regarded as one of the most important Latin American novelists working today, he is the author of seven novels, two volumes of stories and two books of literary essays, as well as hundreds of pages of political commentary. His novel The Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award, among other prizes. In 2012, after sixteen years in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes and Barcelona, Vásquez moved back to Bogotá. His novels are currently published in 28 languages.