ABSTRACT
When Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti (or Bartolomeo Turco) published the first printed version of an isolario (a book of island maps) in Venice in 1485, he was counted among the first editors to standardize recent representations of the Aegean archipelago. His Isolario was a book of “fantasy islands” drawn from real space and recent history. Its images and poems pulled his readers through an ordered scatter of Grecian islands inhabited by strange and alluring shapes. With its forty-nine maps of the Aegean islands, his quarto Isolario was a modest undertaking by comparison with the synchronous printing of folio editions of Ptolemy's Geographia in Rome and Florence. 1 But the work bore implications of a consequence similar to that of the dissemination of the printed atlas of the second-century Alexandrian cartographer.
