By its nature geography invites us to experiment with new perspectives on the space we inhabit and on what occupies it and gives it meaning. This is the spirit of allurement that gave rise to the first section of the exhibition, Pages on the Move, which offers an unconventional look at well-known items that have been observed many times over.

The extraordinary bequest of books illustrated with maps received by the museum in fact consists of highly celebrated and repeatedly studied pieces: Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicles of Nuremberg, Philipp Cluver’s Ancient Italy and Willem and Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Novus, to mention only a few, are masterpieces that have been at the centre of painstaking research endeavours.

Today, one end of the thread of those efforts is in the hands of the museum, which has decided to approach the books from a somewhat unusual angle: one, that is, which views them as objects that move in space, circulating information of inestimable value. To do so, the museum has gathered together and appraised the labels which distinguish these specimens from all the others and which help reconstruct their specific “biography”, made up of the moments when they passed between the various owners who have perused, studied, but also annotated and, sometimes, even initialled or signed them. Through these marks — be they signatures, notes, stamps or labels — it is possible to piece together a space-time itinerary whose stages are represented by the lives of those who owned and loved the books for a certain time in a certain place. In a similar way the hidden biographies of the maps and other objects also emerge, as do the travel stories of such pages.

The museum has presented what it has been possible to discern of this itinerary in a meta-cartography, in other words a map of the maps, on which the user can retrace interactively the movement of individual specimens from their place of publication, across nations or continents, up to their arrival in the museum.