Europae Tabula VI

Title

Europae Tabula VI

Description

Map shows the whole of Italy with the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and partly Sicily.

ca. 1564

Artist

Ruscelli (1518-1566)

Girolamo Ruscelli (1518-1566) was an Italian polymath, humanist, editor, and cartographer active in Venice during the early 16th century. Ruscelli is best known for his important revision of Ptolemy's Geographia, which was published post humously in 1574. It is generally assumed that Alexius Pedemontanus was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an ‘Academy of Secrets’ that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.

Historical Description

The history of Italy encompasses the developments in the territory of the Italian Republic from prehistory to the present. The history of Italy, documented by written sources, only begins after the colonization by Italian peoples. Alongside them, the Etruscan culture, whose origin is unclear, experienced around 600 BC. Their heyday. In the 8th century BC The Greek colonization of the southern Italian mainland and Sicily had begun, Phoenicians settled on the west coast of the island. These colonies later belonged to Carthage. Most of northern Italy were populated by Gauls. From the 4th century BC BC began the expansion of Rome. the conquest of the Mediterranean and later parts of Central and Northern Europe brought cultural influences and people from all over the empire and the neighboring areas to Italy. The peninsula was the center of the Roman Empire. A dense road network connected the expanding cities, thanks to which the exchange of goods, but also the dependence on external goods, such as wheat and olive oil from North Africa, increased. From the 5th century, Italy came under the rule of Germanic tribes, briefly Ostrom conquered the former core area of the empire in the 6th century. In the 8th century, the north, ruled by the Lombards for about two centuries, was annexed to the Frankish Empire, later to the Holy Roman Empire, while Arabs and Byzantines ruled the south. Feudalism prevailed in most regions in the early Middle Ages. The northern Italian municipalities, which came together in the Lombard League, for example, were able to break away from the influence of the empire in the 12th and 13th centuries and establish their own territories. Of this multitude of territories, the most important were Milan, the naval powers Genoa and Venice, Florence and Rome and southern Italy, which was partly French and partly Spanish. The fact that the Bishop of Rome rose to Pope of the Western Church and that the Eastern Church was separated from the Eastern Church in 1054 played a central role. The French King Philip IV forced the Pope into exile in Avignon in 1309, which lasted until 1378. The return of the popes to Rome accelerated the establishment of the papal state in central Italy, which until 1870 had a significant impact on political developments on the peninsula. From the 14th to the 16th centuries, Italy was the economic and cultural center of the Renaissance. Five leading powers had emerged, with the Papal State playing a role of its own. From the late 15th, but especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, the major European powers - France, Spain and Austria - repeatedly interfered in Italian politics. They sealed off their markets to different degrees from foreign goods. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire exerted heavy military pressure, especially on the Republic of Venice, from the late 14th century. After four centuries of fragmentation and foreign rule, the peninsula was politically united in the course of the national movement of the Risorgimento. The modern Italian state has existed since 1861, Veneto and Friuli were added in 1866, followed by Julisch Venetia (Trieste and Gorizia), Trentino and South Tyrol after the First World War.