Vatican Museums

The Gallery of the Geographical Maps – 120 metres long and 6 metres wide – owes its name to the forty cartographical representations of the Italian territories and Church dominions that Gregory XIII wished to depict in order to recreate the entire peninsula to scale.
Built between 1578 and 1580 by Ottaviano Nonni, known as Mascherino, the Gallery was frescoed in less than two years by a large group of artists coordinated by the painters Girolamo Muziano and Cesare Nebbia, while the iconographic project was entrusted to one of the leading scientific figures of the time, the Perugian Dominican Egnazio Danti, cosmographer, astronomer and mathematician.
Proceeding along the Gallery from the south entrance, the individual territories, depicted in 32 maps, are aligned sequentially from north to south, conceptually divided by the Apennines, with the regions facing the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas on the wall on the side of the Courtyard of the Belvedere, and the regions framed by the Alps and the Adriatic Sea on the side of the Gardens.
At the ends of the Gallery, eight narrower maps represent, on the sides of the current entrance, the Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto, flanked respectively by Elba and the Tremiti Islands, and on the opposite wall, the four major ports of the time: Civitavecchia, Genoa, Venice and Ancona.
Danti accompanied each map with an inscription highlighting its main geopolitical characteristics, also including maps of major cities and some historiae invoking salient events of ancient and modern history, such as the Battle of Metauro, in which the Carthaginian troops were defeated by the Romans (207 B.C.), or the siege of Mirandola by Julius II (1511).
Danti was also responsible for the complex iconographic programme of the ceiling, on which 51 panels, set in rich stucco frames and interspersed with scenes from the Old Testament, biblical characters and allegories of Christian virtues, illustrate significant episodes in the history of the Church or the lives of saints linked to the regions below.
A fundamental testimony to the geography and cartography of the late 16^th century, the Gallery of Maps appears revolutionary in its choice to represent Italy, at the time divided into many political entities, as a geographical, historical, religious and cultural unit for the first time.