The Gallery Of Maps In The Vatican

In a long bright corridor in the Vatican Palace is one of the world's treasures: the Gallery of Maps. Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580, the Gallery offers a "walking-tour" of Italy's history through forty richly decorated and detailed map frescoes of Italy and its regions. In this volume, each of the forty maps is thoroughly discussed and splendidly illustrated with 143 pages in color. The maps were designed by Egnazio Danti, a Dominican monk and well known cosmographer and mathematician invited by Pope Gregory XIII to leave the University of Bologna and settle in Rome to undertake the decoration of the Gallery.