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This rare and finely engraved Italian map of Southeast Asia was published in Naples by Paolo Petrini in 1717.
The geographic content closely follows Nicolas de Fer's late Louis XIV-era wall map of the region. The map was engraved for Petrini’s Atlante Particolare del Mondo, offering a distinctly Italian presentation of the most current French geographical and ethnographic knowledge.
The map encompasses the Indian Ocean east of the Ganges delta to the western Pacific, including mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the East Indies, and parts of New Guinea and northern Australia. The outline of “Terra de Papous o Nuova Zeelanda” reflects ongoing European confusion about the identity of New Guinea and the hypothetical southern continent. Petrini retains the naming conventions and toponyms introduced by Dutch and Iberian navigators—“Siam,” “Camboge,” “Cochinchina,” “Bengala”—but aligns them with contemporary European mapping conventions, such as the latitude grid, rhumb lines, and a system of proportional scale bars in several units.
Most geographic content, including the note about Borneo’s diamond-bearing rivers and the placement of Tibet’s ‘Barantola’, seat of the Grand Lama, derives directly from de Fer. Like its model, the map also perpetuates the legendary Lake Chiamay, here plotted in the Assamese highlands as the fountainhead of the Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Chao Phraya, and Dharla rivers.
One of the most distinctive features of the map is its elaborate ethnographic cartouche in the lower right, bordered by allegorical river gods: one seated beside a water vessel, the other riding a horned sea monster. The engraved commentary, reset in Petrini’s Italian hand, relates exoticized customs of the peoples of the Philippines, Moluccas, and Sunda Islands, including rituals of warfare, musical practices, and marriage traditions. These include two notes translated as follows:
The inhabitants of the Philippines, whenever they achieve a victory, suck the blood and drink it. They live up in the trees for fear of the many wild beasts and dreadful snakes that abound there. Their women are beautiful and well dressed, and their chief occupation is spinning cotton.
The inhabitants of the Moluccas shoot tiny poisoned darts by blowing them through a small tube; every morning they make a point of sounding a trumpet in all the streets to remind the husbands of their marital duty.
Such colorful reportage mirrors the period’s appetite for travelers’ tales, even as it reveals European misconceptions about the region’s cultures and ecologies.
Petrini’s Atlante Particolare marked a high point in Neapolitan mapmaking, which flourished briefly in the early eighteenth century before Venice reasserted its dominance in the Italian market. While based on a French prototype, the map is wholly recut in the Italian tradition, with particular emphasis on style and legibility. The dedication to “S.C.E.C.M.” (His Most Catholic Majesty) suggests the map was also part of a larger political effort to align Neapolitan output with the Spanish Bourbon crown.
Rarity
This map is known in only a few institutional holdings and rarely appears on the market.
