Tell the Local Geography through Maps. The Cartography at the time of Boiardo

• Main Author: Sara Belotti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Bologna 2019-08-01
• Series: Griseldaonline
• Subjects: historical maps; digital mapping; digital humanities; house of este; geografical information systems; catalan estense mapamundi; orlando in love
• Online Access: https://griseldaonline.unibo.it/article/view/9431

Matteo Maria Boiardo was born in the mid-fifteenth century and began to write Orlando in Love towards the end of the century. At the same time the world was 'opening up' to new worlds, thanks to exploration promoted by Portuguese and Spanish, and the development of cartography was profoundly changing the perception of the world itself, following the rediscovery of the work dedicated to the geography by Ptolemy. Starting from this assumption the paper aims to briefly analyze the geographical context within which the Orlando in Love was written, also through the analysis of one of the maps owned by the House of Este in Ferrara, the so-called Catalan Estense Mapamundi. The paper tries to underline the influence that cartography and geographical knowledge have had on the work of Boiardo, while through digital humanities, and in particular digital cartography, it wants to propose a reinterpretation of the poem, starting from the mapping of places crossed by the characters. In fact, the reworking of the contents proposed by Boiardo and the study of the geography of the poem could be facilitated by the creation of an interactive digital map. This map allows to deconstruct the story and reconstruct new narratives, helping scholars to better understand the interaction between imaginary and reality and, perhaps, could help to come to light new meanings thanks to the construction of a new model, this time spatial, that can give ‘shape’ and ‘space’ to the characters of the poem.