Giovanni da Carignano

Carignano is important to the history of cartography as the author of an early 14th-century nautical portolan chart, depicting, with much skill, most of the world as then known to his Italian contemporaries (Europe, North Africa, Mediterranean, Black Sea and much of the Middle East).

The signature read: Presbiter Johannes Rector sancti Marci de portu Ianue me fecit.

A second mysterious Carignano map, dated 1306, is mentioned routinely in 19th-century lists, but without indication of its location or description of its content, and thus either never existed beyond rumor, or has long been lost.

In the port of Genoa (1306) he interviewed the ambassadors of the Abyssinian negus Wedem Arad; some scholars, as Silverberg, presume he was the first European to locate the legendary Prester John's Kingdom in Africa (Ethiopia) rather than in northern Asia.

Some photographic reproductions of the map (lost in 1943) in: ONGANIA, Ferdinando, Raccolta di mappamondi e carte nautiche dal XIII al SVI secolo, Venezia, 1875–1882, n.3; NORDENSKIÖLD, Adolf Erik von: Periplus: an essay on the early history of charts and sailing-directions; with numerous reprod.