Abstract

The paper examines the curious case of a map representing the border of the Kingdom of Sicily, discovered by Neapolitan intellectual Ferdinando Galiani in 1768, in the French Dépôt de la Guerre in Versailles. Following its title, the map was drawn on the basis of sources from papal archives by humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, presumably at the end of the 1490s. The original of this map has been lost, and there have been discussions on its authenticity. Is it an eighteenth-century forgery aimed at defending the interests of the King of Naples, or a rare, late-fifteenth-century example of a Southern Italian topographic map? Without the original, no definitive answers can be given to this question, but an indepth study of the map’s contents and of the territory it depicts raises a series of considerations in defence of its authenticity