Impero di Alessandro

Historical map depicting the territories of Alexander the Great's empire, around 323 BC. 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.

Benedetto Marzolla is famous for being among the most important cartographers of the XIX century, for being the one to print geographic maps using high quality lithographies.

His Atlante Geografico, made of 58 maps, presents finely sketched works. Six maps depict North America, among them famous map of gold diggers in California, deriving from Hippolite Ferry. Extremely relevant are also the maps of Antarctic, South Africa with the plan of Cape Town and those about Australia.

Though the maps are dated between 1843 and 1856, this 1858 edition, printed in Naples at the Stabilimento Geografico Strada San Carlo (founded by Marzolla himself), represents the final version of his atlas, the last one before his death. A posthumous edition will be published in 1865.

The atlas is pretty rare, is not actually listed in Phillips, British Library e OCLC.

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

Bibliografia

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