La Sfera 

 What is La sfera? 

La sfera / The Sphere, written by the Florentine merchant, Goro Dati, is a curious textbook in poetic form—ottava rima, rhyming stanzas of 8 lines each—designed to introduce the next generation of Florentine merchants to natural phenomena, navigation, and the topography of the Mediterranean. The four books of La Sfera discuss various topics on the Earth, the heavens, and their creation, as well as the ways in which they are connected. Book I explains the globe, cosmology, astrology, and natural phenomena, emphasizing how interconnected they are. Book II discusses larger-scale natural phenomena such as the four elements, weather, seasons, and the four humors. Book III explains the winds and depicts nautical charts as well as navigation systems. This portion also shows the arrangement of the three continents, emphasizing an understanding of geography and a ROUND EARTH. Book IV completes the work with an itinerary of major Mediterranean and Black Sea ports.

What is the La Sfera Project up to now?

We are planning a multimedia digital edition, which will integrate IIIF images of original manuscripts, a new critical Italian text, an annotated English translation, and a cartographic interface to visualize geospatial data. The digital edition will also include a pedagogical introduction to the text and a data collection page where scholars will be able to compare new La sfera data of their own from manuscripts not included in our initial dataset.