Enfilade

From the Interactive Nolli Map Website, University of Oregon

Under the direction of Jim Tice and Erik Steiner, the University of Oregon has constructed a stunning interactive version of Giambattista Nolli’s Map of Rome from 1748. The digital version, available online for free, is user-friendly, searchable, and comes with several essays that introduce Roman geography, social history, and eighteenth-century cartography. There’s also a fine bibliography. The map can be overlaid with a variety of layers: Gardens, the Tiber River, Rioni, Fountains, City Gates, Walls of Rome, Pathways, Map Icons, and Satellite Images. In addition to exploring (and now modelling) standards that we should expect of scholarly digital projects, the Nolli Map could offer immediately practical uses for teaching assignments. And if you find that the virtual map just makes you want a paper version all the more, the project organizers have teamed up with Raven Maps to produce a new edition available for $95 (in 2005, around the time of the launch of the Nolli wesbsite, one of the original maps sold at Christie’s for £7800, or just over $13,000). The University of Oregon website makes the Raven edition sound irresistible:

At approximately two-thirds the original size, it measures 45 inches by 52.6 inches (114cm x 133cm). It is printed at a scale of 1:4,500, where 1 inch equals 375 feet. Produced to the highest standards in mind, the edition is printed with stochastic screening on 100 lb Finch Fine paper. Stochastic screening is recognized for its superior representation of fine lines and tonal values, and is commonly used for printing high quality black and white photography. The process (in which printed dots are spread randomly throughout the image area instead of in a grid pattern) yields a warmer, less mechanical result perfect for a map of this vintage. A process black ink was used for the printed area and an antique tint lends the map an elegant look and feel.