Podcast transcript
Breathing new life into old maps
Dr Lisa Beaven
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Transcript
- Matt Smith
I'm standing overlooking the city of Naples, and before me I can see a castle. In the distance I can see Mount Vesuvius, but if I look towards the north, towards Rome, there’s a big region there that stretches a distance called the Roman Campagna. These days it’s quite well developed but back in its day it used to have extensive fields, heavily wooded areas, lots of vineyards. This area might be gone but one thing that remains are the maps. These maps were meticulously drawn and they contained a fantastic amount of detail. There’s now a project to breathe new life into these maps, by digitally scanning them, and overlaying the results on their modern digital counterparts.
Before we get to that though, let’s examine the maps themselves. For that, we’ll be looking at the originals in the British School of Rome and we’ll be speaking to the school’s Director, Professor Christopher Smith, and Librarian, Valerie Scott.
- Valerie Scott
So, this is a map from 1704 and I’ll just turn the page here.
- Matt Smith
Now, it’s a map actually in book form, which I didn’t expect really.
- Valerie Scott
That’s right. They were printed on individual pages and sometimes they were put onto linen and sometimes they were bound into a volume. This is probably not how it originally would have been – this is a later binding that was done at a later stage. This map by Giovanni Battista Cingolani, is a map of the Campagna Romana. The Campagna Romana for our purposes, goes from Lake Bolsena in the north, down to the Pontine Marshes in the south and the remarkable thing about this map is that it shows in great detail not only individual buildings but also the landscape, the geography. As you can see, even where there were woods and trees, and what’s very interesting, if we turn the page to the part to the south of Rome, here near Anzio, and Nettona, we can see that there were an extraordinary amount of woods that today have gone. So these maps can tell us an awful lot about the landscape and the geography but it also tells us about the ownership, because all the tenancy, those are the estates that were owned by individuals, are delineated, which makes it a fascinating record of the area.
- Matt Smith
What’s an example of that?
- Valerie Scott
Actually, these are numbered and there is a key which tells you who these belonged to. There’s a remarkable amount of information.
- Matt Smith
From the early 1700s, this one.
- Valerie Scott
This is from 1704, that’s right, and then the other map that we’re looking at is earlier – it’s from 1693 and this is by a man called Giacomo Filippo Ameti, and this has a similar kind of information.
- Matt Smith
Is that sort of information available anywhere else, or is it just in these maps that you can get a grasp of the events that were happening at the time?
- Christopher Smith
I think that one of the intriguing things is that the maps give us very determined locations and localisations of information. It’s easy enough to have somebody writing various accounts but the two things that those sorts of information give us – firstly, it helps us understand the topography of Italy, which isn’t straightforward, and places where actually was this place mentioned in the source? Well, the map helps us. It’s also, to some extent, about the preservation of memory. These maps are also important for the development of cartography as well, and creating a more accurate picture of Italy.
- Matt Smith
How accurate is a map like this and how would they have gone about assembling it?
- Christopher Smith
A lot is observation from the sea, putting together itineraries which are basically from here to here, is x space, and gradually refining. So that we start from a base of early maps, the most interesting early map we have is the Tabula Peutingeriana which looks to be a late Roman map. It’s a very, very long map. It’s several feet in length and down the middle of it is Italy, running as this kind of long straight thing. It’s very inaccurate from one point of view, but from another point of view, it’s actually very accurate because it’s got distances marked. Those distances are pretty good. Over time, particularly with better information from seaborne commerce, of the shape and nature of the coast and the Mediterranean, you can then begin to contextualise that information. And one of the things which our locations, you know, this is the property of so and so is doing, or is indicating, is ways in which people are increasingly needing to define the space that they own.
- Valerie Scott
This map is actually pretty accurate. I think at this time it was becoming more of a science, through guesswork we can pretty much trust this map to show an accurate picture of what was there at the time.
- Matt Smith
Better still, considered in some aspects a work of art as well.
- Valerie Scott
Yes, I think so, absolutely. We can see at the bottom there, a representation of the sea and with a ship and the waves, so certainly the whole thing, I think, can be definitely considered a work of art.
- Matt Smith
A work of art it may be, but these maps are now just part of the picture. The next part of their story takes place on the other side of the world, in Melbourne.
So, I'm standing here with Dr Lisa Beaven, an art historian from La Trobe University, and Chris Myers, who is from VeRSI and we’re standing in a vislab with a map on a large screen wrapped around the room, which is voice controlled and motion controlled, so Chris is going to do the steering for this little adventure. So, Lisa, can you tell me what we’re looking at here? What’s this map in front of us?
- Lisa Beaven
Well, this is one of three maps that we’re hoping to digitalise. This is the second one, and it’s by Ameti, and it was actually made in 1693, of the Roman Campagna, which is the countryside around Rome. Now these maps are held in the British School in Rome and this one’s actually quite rare. I got interested in the maps because I was doing a project on Claude Lorraine, and his paintings and drawings, and there are hundreds of drawings that are evidence that he travelled around this countryside, drawing as he went, and I wanted to find out what the countryside was like in the 17th century, and that led me to the maps, and the more research I did, not just on the maps, but on archival documentation and so on, actually showed that the countryside around Rome in that period was really extremely unhealthy, because of malaria, and what I find fascinating about these maps is they actually contain within them, evidence for that climate change.
- Matt Smith
After you found the maps in the British School of Rome, they were scanned, then they go to Chris, and Chris, what do you do with the maps at this point?
- Chris Myers
This map in particular is four separate maps, so we stitch the maps together, and then we can make big images or print them, or digitalise them or overlay them into other GSI-type informational systems. We can do things like overlays on Google Earth and things like that and do terrain mapping and things like that.
- Matt Smith
Lisa, if you could take us to something that you think is of note in this that you wouldn’t know otherwise.
- Lisa Beaven
There are two crucial things about this. One is that in the library maybe five people a year would see the map. We’re trying to actually create a resource we can put up online that everyone can access. But I think the other point is that this is an incredible example of what high resolution digitalisation can do. So if we go to the Pontine Marshes for example, which is down here, on the right of the map, Chris is going to drive it now, we hope.
- Chris Myers
Computer, mouse centre. Computer, zoom in ten times.
- Matt Smith
Right, so this a very high resolution, much higher than the physical map is. Does it lose much when you pull it up to this resolution?
- Lisa Beaven
Well, these were actually scanned by our colleagues at the Herziana Library, the German library in Rome, and they had this incredible equipment. So what we managed to do was get this incredibly high resolution into these maps. Once you actually magnify them to this extent, as you can see, they start yielding an enormous amount of data about the canals going through the swamps in the 17th century, because it’s a period of the mini ice age. We’re starting to get increased rainfalls, and these areas are very, very sparsely populated because of malaria, but they’re also the main route down the Via Appia, to Naples. We can see this is the route that all the travellers would make, through the swamps, we can see all the canals, we can see all the tiny little hamlets, the landholdings, we can see paths that people would make, through here. We can see that the stradello, the piecoli, in other words it’s the path here taken by the fishermen through the swamps. The swamps were actually fished by people who lived in the area. So we’ve got an enormous amount of information, historical information, contained in these maps. This particular map tells us who owns all the land holdings around the Roman Campagna at that point, who all the families are, whether there were forests, it even shows you on this map the incredible details of the tiny little huts built by shepherds into the campagna in the 17th century. Just magnifying the maps this much will yield a huge amount of historical data that we didn’t know about before and that you can’t get through other sources, like written sources.
- Matt Smith
What do you do with the map from this point?
- Chris Myers
The next steps for us is to put these maps ... hook them up to a data base system where we can put all the social information, then hotlink areas of the map to display that information, whether it be photos, or written descriptions from books supplied to us about deaths or visits, or armies, or whatever people find relevant to put on it. And we’re hoping to make that available for multiple institutes to add information to, so we can link up with the different research groups to drop that contextual information in, and then we can build up a greater resource around these fantastic maps.
- Lisa Beaven
One of the things we’d like to do with the map, is the British School at Rome and Valerie Scott in particular, the librarian, has been really active in digitalising a lot of the images, and they have a huge archive digitised images of photographs of the 19th century Campagna, so these people have gone out into the Campagna and taken photographs of site-specific spots that might be possible to link our map up with those spots, so we have active hotspots on the map.
- Chris Myers
Computer, mouse centre.
- Matt Smith
This map I recognise. I saw this one in the British School at Rome.
- Lisa Beaven
That’s right.
- Matt Smith
I recognise the man over there with the sextants.
- Lisa Beaven
That’s right. You would have seen the original map that this was actually scanned from. This is 1704 but it was originally made in 16 – something like 1695. It’s basically a year or two later than Ameti. This is more well known than the Ameti map, which is rarer I think. It’s also an extraordinary achievement. These are scaled maps – they’re not surveyed in the sense we understand it. Now the ultimate aim is to actually scan three of them, these two from the 17th century, and one much later map from 1811, a Napoleonic map, in other words, it’s associated with a political event in which Napoleon invaded Italy and the French wanted a map and so it has that sort of political overlay. These are much more about the landholdings, the agricultural nature of the Campagna.
- Matt Smith
Chris, how accurate are you finding these maps when you’re overlaying them onto Google?
- Chris Myers
When we overlaid this particular map onto Google Earth, it was actually amazing to see how close the mountain ranges you see in the right area actually mapped on to the existing mountain ranges and rolled over the three-dimensional hills in that area. We’re finding the rivers have either moved a bit, or are different between the two, and one of the coolest ones we looked at are some of the houses are rotated on the map, we’re guessing for artistic view, for ancient surveying it are very, very accurate, surprisingly.
- Matt Smith
They would have had to have a fairly accurate picture of what the coastline is like at least, for shipping.
- Lisa Beaven
Yes, what is interesting is actually how extraordinarily diligently these maps were made. Chris and I have been talking about this. And you think of the amount of information he would have had to try and get in terms of putting into these maps. He had to have accurate information about who owned everything, where all the landmarks were, where all the little towers ... you can see all along the coast there, and Chris is taking us there now, there are a series of watch towers that were actually built in the medieval period because this coastline was vulnerable to Saracen raiding parties. These towers now unfortunately mostly no longer exist now. A large part of the Campagna, as we see it in this map, no longer exists because of urban sprawl and various reasons, a lot of these landmarks have been destroyed. So that’s another reason why these maps are important.
It is actually incredible and I just think it’s so fascinating, when we are finished, you may be able to click on one of these areas, like Pratica, and you might be able to go to what Pratica was, in Ancient Rome, and then go forward in time to the early modern period, here, the 17th century, and then maybe go through to Pratica in the 19th century, see the photos that were taken of it by ex-Directors of the British School, which are in the library and see how the whole range of information in which the map is just the centre of that web, which is stretching out in all directions. That’s the basic idea.
Focused, Ambitious and Transformative ideas - 
