Welcome to La Sfera!
Written by the Florentine merchant Gregorio Dati around 1425, La sfera —The Globe—is a curious treatise in poetic form designed to introduce Dati's contemporaries to the natural world, maritime navigation, and the topography of the Mediterranean.
This multimedia digital edition presents English and Italian versions of Dati's text alongside images from the more than 180 fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts that transmit the text. The edition is more than just text, however: our site is built on a database that records links between Dati's text, manuscript images, and spatial data.
Accordingly, this site has a number of possible entry points: you can start by looking up particular manuscripts in the Manuscripts tab, exploring Dati's placenames in the Gazetteer, or investigating the annotations to the Italian or English Edition. If you're not already familiar with Dati's work, however, we suggest you start with the Introduction, which offers an overview of the world that created La sfera.
