Copper engraving, hand-painted, mm 190x263. Fascinating map depicting the islands of Sardinia and Sicily according to the Gastaldino model. Taken from the Venetian edition of Ptolemy's "Geographia" edited by Ruscelli. The map is based on Gastaldi's 1548 map published in his edition of the 'Geographia' a few years earlier. Girolamo Ruscelli (1500-1566) was born in Viterbo and was an important writer and publisher, who after studying in Padua spent his career between Rome and Naples, where he died.Ptolemy, the greatest cartographer of antiquity, published The Geography in 150 AD. In the Middle Ages it survived, thanks to Arabic mediation, manuscripted in Greek and was later translated into Latin by Jacopo D'Angelo; from the beginning of the 15th century it became increasingly popular and in 1477 the first illustrated printed edition was published in Bologna, including only maps of the ancient world, immediately followed by other editions in 1478, -80, -82 that already featured some maps of the modern world. With the succession of editions, the number of modern maps increased, aware that the world was quite different from Ptolemy's, until Waldseemueller's famous edition of 1513, the first modern atlas, comprised of 20 new maps in addition to the ancient ones. In the course of the 16th century and beyond, numerous editions were published, including those edited by Ruscelli, whose modern maps are those of Gastaldi of 1548 in an enlarged version. Excellent specimen