Bird's-Eye by De'Barbari, Jacopo (1500)

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This map of Venice was created by De'Barbari, Jacopo in 1500.

Description

The de'Barbari map is one of the most detailed historic maps of Venice known to exist. Its age is of great importance, because it is one of the oldest maps available. The map is immensely detailed and gives historians a powerful glimpse at what Venice looked like hundreds of years ago. The map shows us where canals were that don't exist anymore, and how people were distributed throughout the islands.

The map is difficult to extract information from due to its perspective. De'Barbari used the views from three bell towers to develop his view of Venice. It effectively has three different perspectives, which makes it difficult to correlate with modern street information.

The Venice Project Center has an extremely high quality scan of the map. That map is explorable using the tool linked at in the External Links section. de'Barbari's map has been a favorite of historians for use in books, and the tool allows people to easy download pieces of it. Eventually, the VPC would like to add layers to the map coloring in certain areas of interest, such as canals and churches.

The de'Barbari Explorer Explore and save pieces of an extremely high quality version of de'Barbari's Map.

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See Also

• Maps