Left: The two globes in the Sala Tassiana of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai in Bergamo.
Center: Coronelli's two globes.
Right: Terraqueous Globe detail of Japan.
If you walk into the Sala Tassiana of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai in Bergamo, the first thing that catches your eyes are the intricate ceiling frescoes. After that your eyes will naturally be drawn to two enormous globes positioned on the southwest side of the room overlooking Piazza Vecchia. The globes are by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1650 - 1718), a Venetian friar, cosmographer of the Serenissima, and enthusiastic compiler of the world as it was understood in 1688.
Each globe is so large you have to walk around it, let's say orbit it, several times to take it all in. One globe is for the heavens (globo celeste) and one for the earth (globo terracqueo). Each globe has a circumference of 3 meters and 33 centimeters and is made of 50 sheets of paper, printed as segments that adhered to the spherical surface and watercoloured.
The terrestrial globe, in particular, is a kind of time capsule of global knowledge. Australia drifts at the bottom like a partially remembered dream — its outline incomplete, its proportions speculative. North America is traced confidently along the coasts, but the interior is a vast narrative improvisation: mountain ranges guessed at, rivers wandering like afterthoughts. Coronelli’s coastlines are often sharp and surprisingly accurate; the continents’ insides are where imagination filled in for evidence.
Standing before the globe, you can't help but fell the tug of its contradictions, the authority of its ink paired with the tentativeness of its knowledge. A world rendered boldly, yet only partially known.
Thinking about cartography and old (half-wrong) globes, I realized I’ve been carrying around a map of my own that has just undergone its own quiet redrawing.
Terra Incognita and Other Honest Admissions
Old maps leave blank spaces where knowledge fails. Terra incognita or the famous "unknown land." People often imagine all medieval maps saying “Here be dragons,” but only one globe actually used the phrase. The Latin version
hic sunt dracones appears on the Hunt–Lenox Globe, a tiny copper sphere from the early 1500s, and its presence says more about us than about geography. Still, the myth persists because it captures something true: when humans face the unknown, we fill it with monsters.
Cartographers, ever resourceful, handled their ignorance with style. If they didn’t know what was inland, they placed a camel caravan or a decorative wind god in the region. The message was simple: We don’t know what’s here, but we’d like you to admire the artistry anyway. And sometimes the flourish was enough.
Hic sunt dracones was less a warning about danger than a placeholder for everything cartographers couldn’t yet explain — a polite way of saying, “Your guess is as good as ours.”
I’ve been thinking about these blank spaces, how every map is as notable for what it includes as for what it admits it cannot.
And how, quietly, the same is true for the maps we inherit in life.
We’re often told these inherited maps are authoritative with their fixed borders, fixed routes, and fixed loyalties. They come bundled with warnings about venturing too far outside them. But like old globes, the authority doesn’t always match the accuracy.
On Personal Maps and the Places That Go Blank
Each of us begins with a kind of inherited map: family on one shore, childhood landmarks on another, a river or two connecting everything. It isn’t a map we draw ourselves. It’s issued to us, like a passport full of destinations we didn’t choose but learned to navigate.
Lately, two parts of my inherited map have slipped into blankness.
Not dramatically. No earthquakes, no torn parchment. Just… absence. One region faded through time and paperwork. Another through silence and distance. Two old territories that once felt central but now feel as if the cartographer simply put down the pen and moved on.
I’ve been surprised by how strange but right this feels.
Sometimes seeing the final outline of an old map complete with its omissions, its boundaries, its blank spaces is strangely clarifying. A territory I once assumed I belonged to turns out not to include me after all. Its borders close, not with malice, but with finality.
And like the medieval mapmakers, I’m left to decide what to put in the newly empty space: a dragon? A sea creature? A polite label that simply reads terra incognita?
Or nothing at all.
The Portolan Problem
Portolan charts were practical medieval sailing maps that showed coastlines with astonishing accuracy. Harbors were carefully sketched, headlands crisply rendered, wind roses scattered across the seas like compass confetti.
But the interiors? Blank. Portolan charts didn’t depict inland geography at all, not because the mapmakers lacked imagination, but because sailors simply didn’t need that information. Their job was straightforward: help you avoid running your boat into things.
This is oddly relatable in my own personal cartography. I know the coastlines of things, the visible contours of family stories, the major events, the places where people intersected with my life. But the interior terrain? The motivations, histories, silences? The land routes that might explain how these regions evolved?
Never mapped. Maybe never mappable.
Seeing the final shape of an inherited relationship sometimes feels like standing at the edge of a portolan chart: coastline crystal clear, interior completely unknown. And that’s just the nature of the document.
Left: Vincenzo Maria Coronelli's Globo terracqueo.
Center left: Terraqueous Globe - portrait of the author, dedications to the Republic of Venice and to the Doge Andrea Morosini.
Center right: Terraqueous Globe - showing the California Problem - California as an Island.
Right: Vincenzo Maria Coronelli's Globo celeste.
Aging, the Slow Redrawing of Continents
If family drafts the first edition of our personal atlas, aging is the relentless editor who arrives later with new measurements, a sharper pencil, and no patience for outdated geography.
I’ve noticed how aging quietly redraws my internal map in ways I didn’t authorize: - Hills I once sprinted up now have contour lines I’m obliged to respect.
- New territories appear, which I never noticed before, while old ones recede.
- Bodily limits creep in like rising sea levels, reshaping the coastline. It’s not loss exactly. More like the natural erosion of certainty.
Aging teaches you that maps are temporary. Bodies change, habits change, desires change. The bright red “you are here” dot keeps sliding when you’re not looking.
And yet the movement brings its own kind of curiosity: What new shore is this? When did this path appear? Who added this mountain?
It's the same impulse that kept old cartographers revising their work — not despair, but discovery.
On Living with Blank Spaces
What is interesting about old maps is how their creators handled uncertainty. They didn’t erase the world when they guessed wrong. They didn’t tear up the parchment because a coastline had to be redrawn.
They just corrected it. Layer by layer, year by year.
A map was never a pronouncement. It was a working draft.
I take some comfort in that. The blank spaces on my own map — the ones left by two relationships that no longer hold coordinates — don’t need to be filled in. They don’t need dragons or speculation or a desperate search for forgotten detail.
They can remain terra incognita.
What matters more is the rest of the map, the life unfolding around me minute by minute, person by person, hill by hill. The routes I return to again and again. The territories of curiosity I didn’t know existed until recently.
As with old maps, the ongoing task isn’t to restore what’s missing. It’s to keep drawing.
The Beauty of Being Wrong
Perhaps we love old maps because they’re wrong. The distortions, the extravagant guesses, the charming errors reveal the world in transition. They show how much we’ve learned and how much we once didn’t know.
Maybe personal maps are the same.
The edges blur, the borders shift, some regions dissolve. New ones appear out of nowhere, like volcanic islands rising overnight. The dragons turn out to be shadows. The silence becomes a kind of border. The blank spaces stop asking to be filled.
Sometimes a map becomes more accurate not by adding detail, but by letting certain regions fade.
When I look back at the maps I’ve drawn at different moments in my life, what I appreciate most is not their accuracy but their evolution. Each one captured what was known at the time with the contours I could see clearly then. And each one changed as new information arrived and old assumptions fell away. In retrospect, the revisions matter more than the originals. The places where the coastline was guessed at. The parts where I ran out of ink. The occasional sea monster, added for charm.
Because a map, after all, is only interesting when it’s still in progress.
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