Impero del Giappone

An interesting and uncommon detailed and large-scale Italian map of Japan published in Naples in Benedetto Marzolla's Atlante Geographico . Inset: Porto di Nangasaki (scale ca. 1:115,000).

Includes notes and statistical tables. With extensive notes in the left and bottom part, listing his cartographic sources and giving political and statistical information on the area.

Including the islands of "Argonaut" and Dagelet". In lower right the islands of "Mounin-sima or Bonin-sima". A group of islands discovered by Beechey in June 1827.

Map taken from the Atlante geografico. Corredato di notizie relative alla geografia fisica politica, ed in generale alla statistica delle varie regioni del Globo. Compilato ed eseguito in litografia per cura e sotto la direzione di Benedetto Marzolla published in Naples in 1858.

Marzolla, author of important atlases on the provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, is also the author of several maps on the Ecclesiastical Circumscriptions in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, published posthumously in the same year of his death (1858) in Naples in the Stabilimento Geografico directed by Luigi Manzella.

Benedetto Marzolla was draftsman topographer and lithographer, geographer and cartographer. Character of great importance in the Neapolitan and Italian cartography of the nineteenth century, Marzolla obtained during his life public recognition and certificates for the production of high quality cartography. His notoriety slowly faded after his death; it should be noted, however, that only the lack of a strong political involvement in the sense of the Risorgimento and of a literary value in his work did not make him as famous as his contemporaries Francesco Costantino Marmocchi (1805-1858) and Attilio Zuccagni-Orlandini (1783-1872), with whom he can certainly compare himself. Marzolla's cultural, didactic and editorial projects were, and remain, extraordinarily modern; he invented a new way of understanding and drawing maps, providing an absolutely original vision of the communication of geographical data through the combination of text and image. With this operation, he was able to merge in a single work, history, geography, economics, statistics and cartography, achieving a graphic balance of rare effectiveness.

Beautiful specimen with contemporary coloring of the contours, in excellent condition.

Bibliografia

V. Valerio, Benedetto Marzolla Brindisino, Geografo e Cartografo dell’800 Europeo (2008), p. 62, n. 87.