Gallery of Maps
One of the most beautiful and evocative parts of the Vatican Museums is undoubtedly the long corridor 120 meters long and 6 meters wide leading to the Sistine Chapel decorated with geographical maps.
Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII, the Gallery of maps was built between 1580 and 1585. The frescoes were painted by Italian and Flemish artists under the direction of Ignazio Danti, a mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer.
The walls of the gallery are covered with forty geographical maps of the different regions of Italy, with maps of the most important towns and cities. On the ceiling, next to each region, there are representations of the main religious events that took place there.
At the end of the gallery there are frescoes of the main Italian ports of the sixteenth century: Civitavecchia, Genoa, Ancona and Venice.
The layout of the maps follows an ideal itinerary along the Apennines with the Tyrrhenian regions on the left walls and the Adriatic ones on the right walls.
The peculiarity of some of the maps is that some appear upside down to the visitor because in the sixteenth century it was not customary to place the north at the top of the map.
The Vatican Gallery of Maps is a symbolic representation of spiritual as well as geographical unity.
The maps that make up the cartographic route are:
- two maps for Apulia (Salento Peninsula and Gargano and Tavoliere);
- one map for Abruzzo;
- three maps for the Marche region (Piceno, Agro di Ancona and Duchy of Urbino);
- four maps for Emilia Romagna (Flaminia, Duchy of Ferrara, Province of Bologna, Duchy of Parma and Piacenza);
- four maps for Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige and Lombardy;
- one map for Piedmont;
- one map for Liguria;
- two maps for Tuscany (Etruria and Elba);
- two maps for Umbria (Agro Perugino and Agro Spoletino);
- two maps for Lazio (Heritage of San Pietro, Lazio and Sabina)
- two maps for Campania (Campania and the Principality of Salerno);
- one map for Basilicata;
- two maps for Calabria (Calabria Hither and Calabria Ulterior)
- one map for Sicily;
- one map for Sardinia;
- one map for Corsica, then under Genoese rule;
- one map for Malta, then the territory of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John.
There is also a map of the "Territory of Avignon", a French town that belonged to the Pope at the time, and two large general maps showing ancient and modern Italy.