This glimpse into the land of water opens with this Carta corografica della Provincia dell’Umbria sulla proporzione di 1:86.400 tratta per cura della Deputazione Provinciale dalla Carta della Direzione del Catasto nell’Umbria map drawn by Cesare Sacchetti in 1863, in the earliest days of unified Italy and the newly set up region comprised land in what are now the provinces of Perugia, Terni and Rieti. The provinces of Terni and Rieti were not created until the 1920s with the latter being broken off from Umbria. It is a large, extremely detailed map in 16 sheets drawn from Giovanni Marieni’s Carta topografica dello Stato Pontificio e del Gran-ducato di Toscana published by the Vienna Institute of Military Geography in 1851, and using the same scale. The sheet top right shows its title, technical specifications and an allegory of Umbria, showing a woman sitting between the Marmore Waterfalls and Lake Trasimeno with a cornucopia of fruit at her feet – embodying fertility – a painter’s palette, a kithara and certain tools of measurement, symbolising the arts, and a helmet and Roman fasces to commemorate the region’s ancient history. This personification of Umbria is at least partially drawn from Umbria’s image and description in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia “An elderly woman dressed in ancient style, wearing a helmet… with her right hand raised and holding up a temple… and her left hand resting on a crag from which large quantities of water are rushing down.”
The glass case contains the Imago Italiae atlas open at Umbria. It was published by De Agostini in 1941. The maps are the work of Russian illustrator, painter and set designer Vsevolod Petrovič Nikulin (Nicouline), a naturalised Italian citizen, whose innovative geo-painterly style shows Umbria’s main towns with their most emblematic buildings, its people in traditional clothes and its points of interest and agricultural, commercial, tourist and industrial features.