W
e look through maps.
Instead of the object, we see the place. We point to an abstract yellow line on a white screen and say, “that’s my street.”
We trust a blue line to guide us as we drive our cars through unfamiliar city streets or rural landscapes as we wonder “where is it sending me?’’
When I share maps of Canberra, Australia with my students to use in digital mapping classes, first they find their homes and the places they know. They seek an immediate familiar relationship with the maps by seeing the place first and the object second. It is often only when we get to the speculative plans of early Canberra that they start to see the object and there’s an “aha moment. “Ooh, wait that's not there”, “the lake doesn’t look like that really”, and then, “is this a real map?”
Reality is a slippery concept when it comes to maps. They are objects that are inherently abstract, completely unlike the physical places they purport to depict; a collection of symbols and lines shown from an aerial perspective that is not one we usually observe places from. Yet we are so accustomed to using them to mediate our relationship with the real world and our movement through it that they seem entirely familiar and legible.
Maps as Historical Objects (and Objects of History-Making)
500 years ago, in the 17th century, a number of large maps of the Roman Campagna were created to show the countryside around Rome that more or less equates with what is now the region of Lazio. This was papal territory around 1700. Much of the land was controlled by the Vatican, smaller religious organizations, or owned by powerful noble families like the Colonna and the Borghese. From at least the 3rd century AD, the date of the marble fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, maps had depicted the city of Rome, but the surrounding countryside had not been documented as often. Then, from the 1670s, several maps were created in relatively quick succession, suggesting a desire to visualize and understand the surrounding countryside (Frutaz, 1972). These maps include details of agriculture, environment (swamps, rivers and forests), roads, ports, sea defenses and general topography. They offer us a way to understand a landscape that has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, which has become the focus of mythmaking and idealization.
In recent decades, critiques of the intellectual assumptions of cartography and geography have pointed out the role maps play in establishing and supporting political power and the delineation of territory (Mitchell, 2002).
Maps as Markers of Mobility
We can also view maps through the lens of movement or mobility (Steinberg, 2009), and extend this approach to engaging with maps as historical objects. Our collective fascination with maps is linked to the way that we use them to literally find ourselves, to help us process spatial information and from there to make sense of how we are connected to the wider world.
In contrast with 1700, today maps are often mobile objects. We carry them with us as we move around a place (on paper or on a screen). But they are also objects that offer the possibility of mobility to a viewer to transport them to a place they are not in geographically or historically. Some maps present imagined realities and utopias. We can trace imagined journeys with a finger and “consulting a world map ensures that faraway is always close at hand” (Brotton, 2012: 15).
When we look at the early modern maps of the countryside around Rome through the lens of power, control and mobility, we can begin to locate ourselves in a landscape that is now transformed. A century or more of development under the expanding boundaries of cities and towns has seen the draining of swampy areas like the Pontine Marshes as well as the urbanization of coastal ports and beaches.
In earlier centuries the landscape was transformed in the visual arts, during the early modern period the Roman Campagna was reinvented by artists like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Their paintings presented a bucolic vision of fertile land, occupied by contented workers, stories from classical myth or biblical history (Beaven, Grant, and Whitelaw, 2018: 214).
Although the vision of the Campagna as it was collectively imagined by artists became a touchstone for Western ideals of the nature, the maps from this period transport us to a very different place.
Topography of Rome’s Agricultural Land
Giovanni Battista Cingolani della Pergola’s Topografia dell’Agro Romano (Topography of Rome’s Agricultural Land) was first printed in 1692. It is made up of six sheets which together are almost two meters long and one meter wide. The digitized map is today viewed as a unified whole, but the physical map is often stored as a series of separate sheets, which require the viewer to shuffle them (gently) around. Other versions have been taped together, but they still fill a large table, the original, physical objects are unwieldy and take physical effort to view, their very size a statement of the vastness of the place they depict.
The motivations for Cingolani’s creation of this map are not entirely clear, but it was likely created in part by compiling the visual information of smaller cadastral maps from a 1660 project to survey the landscape initiated by Pope Alexander VII (Passigli, 2012). They visibly represent the papacy’s desire to assert control over agricultural production during a period of serious food insecurity. Extreme weather events brought on by the change in climate between 1300 and 1800, often dubbed the little ice-age’, caused crops to fail and made rulers anxious about pacifying a hungry population (Parker, 2013).
If we look closely at this map, we can see it records not only the vastness of the territory but also the damage this landscape had suffered following deforestation and the effects of climate change.
Then and Now
The map shows a prevalence of swamps (stagno) that led to regular malarial outbreaks, the sparse habitation and few towns indicate a reliance on seasonal workers, and the defensive sea towers that line the coast remind us of the risk of raids from the sea.
A close reading of Cingolani’s map can challenge our assumptions of a pre-industrial revolution landscapes as idyllic and undamaged. They prompt us instead to consider the mobility of itinerant workers forced against their will to work in a place where the risk of dying from malaria or attack by bandits was high. We can trace the movement of confraternities who then collected their bodies (Beaven, 2015), the journeys of Grand Tourists who hurried through as fast as they could to reach the more desirable destinations and the artists who began to traverse sections and to record sketches of this challenging landscape.
For historians of landscape, older maps help us locate ourselves in the past. They show the buildings, forests and roads of an earlier time but they can also help us understand the experience of place and the values that people have placed upon the urban and natural landscape in earlier periods.
Acknowledgements
My research on the Roman Campagna is part of a collaborative project with Dr Lisa Beaven who first introduced me to those maps, thanks also to Valerie Scott, former head of the British School at Rome Library who generously allowed me to examine the original maps.
References
Beaven, L (2015) Murder and Misericordia: Reconstructing Violent Death and Emotion in the Roman Campagna in the Seventeenth Century. In: Broomhall S and Finn S (eds) Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 59-75.
Beaven, L, Grant, K and Whitelaw, M (2018) Digital Cartographies of the Roman Campagna. In: Boyle JE and Burgess HJ (eds) The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature London and New York: Routledge, pp. 212-226.
Brotton, J (2013) A History of the World in Twelve Maps. London: Penguin, 2013.
Drucker J (2011) Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 5 (1). Available here.
Frutaz, AP (1972) Le carte del Lazio. Istituto di Studi Romani: Rome, 1972.
Mitchell WJT (2002) Landscape and Power. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Parker G Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. Yale: New Haven, 2013.
Passigli S (2012) La costruzione del “Catasto Alessandrino”(1660). Agrimensori, geometri e periti misuratori. In: Bevilacqua M (ed) Piante di Roma, dal rinascimento ai catasti, Artemide: Rome, pp.370-391.
Steinberg, PE (2009) Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99 (3): 467–95.
Dr Katrina Grant is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the history of landscape and the visual representation of nature, as well as the critical application of digital methodologies to the study of history and art history. She is the author of Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022.
