Copper engraving, hand painted in watercolor, mm 351x502. Fascinating copy of the second plate of this paper, overall well preserved with restored woodworm holes in the upper margin. Beautiful and decorative map of the Roman Empire based on Ortelius' own map in two sheets from 1571. This is the second of two plates used by Ortelius; similar to the first, which starting from 1592 he replaced, with the addition of 4 lines of text at the top right. Enriched by the portraits of Romulus and Remus and with the family tree of the succession of the Emperors. At the bottom left a box with the history of the empire; taken from the Parergon, the first historical atlas published with original maps created by Ortelius himself (the first edition dates back to 1624 but some maps, including this one, had already been included as a historical appendix in the "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum", the first modern atlas, including maps of all areas of the world; the brilliant intuition of Ortelius, later Latinized, was precisely this: before then the cartographic production had been irregular, local in terms of production and the few atlases, the so-called "Lafrerian Atlases" were made up of request by collecting maps of some areas, ignoring others.Ortelius brought together the heterogeneous cartographic production of the period into a single corpus, forming the basis for an enormously successful publishing venture, published from 1570 to 1612. Van den Broecke, Ortelius atlas maps, 188