Welcome to our online project on La sfera (The Globe)!

What, you may ask, IS La sfera?

Very simply, La sfera is a poem written by Goro Dati, a cloth merchant who lived in Florence in the late thirteen- and early fourteen-hundreds. In four books of thirty six rhyming stanzas Dati provides his readers (and listeners!) with information about the entire universe, written in Italian. He talks about God, who created the world and all the elements it is made of (air, fire, water, earth); the planets and how their orbits influence people; the earth and its winds and weather, the ocean, other bodies of water and how to navigate them by ship; and finally, he provides an seaborne itinerary stretching from one end of the Mediterranean to the furthest reaches of the Black Sea, accompanied by facts about various ports of call and the people who lived in them.

But when Dati wrote La sfera (sometime between 1420 and 1430), he did rely only on the words of the poem to convey his meaning. He also wanted pictures to accompany his words, because

some of the ideas are complicated, and the places he mentioned unfamiliar. So, many copies of La sfera also include amazing diagrams, pictures of people and places, and maps featuring many of the locales Dati mentions in the poem.

As one might imagine, a work like this —with beautiful diagrams, pictures, and maps, written in the language used by everyday Florentines rather thand Latin, the language of scientists and philosophers—soon became very popular. In the eighty or so years after the work was written, this very popular work was copied many times over, and over 160 of those manuscript copies survive to this day. What we learn from looking at these is that La sfera was copied by all sorts of people, from the very rich to those of more modest means. La sfera was a true best seller of its time, and we can learn much about the time and place in which it was created and copied by understanding the work—through the poem's words and ideas but also in the way the images and maps are presented and recopied—and by studying its afterlife.

The goal of this project is to bring La sfera, and the many medieval versions of it, to students and scholars interested in this fascinating moment in history, in the decades just before Europeans turned their attention westward across the Atlantic, to the newly discovered lands that would become the Americas. To do so, we have prepared the following materials:

1. An Italian edition of the text, adjusted for easy reading,
2. An English translation, following this new edition,
3. A gazetteer, or list of places found in the poem and in maps from La sfera manuscripts, with an accompanying map of these same places,
4. A list of manuscripts that contain La sfera, and when possible links to those that have been fully digitized and made open to the public,

We welcome you to explore La sfera in this new digital format, made for easy online use and reuse. Enjoy!