Vatican Gallery of Maps

The Gallery of Maps[1] (Italian: Galleria delle carte geografiche) is a gallery located on the west side of the Belvedere Courtyard in the Vatican containing a series of painted topographical maps of Italy based on drawings by friar and geographer Ignazio Danti.

The panels map the entirety of the Italian peninsula in large-scale frescoes, each depicting a region as well as a perspective view of its most prominent city.

With the Apennines as a partition, one side depicts the regions surrounded by the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas and the other depicts the regions surrounded by the Adriatic Sea.

After the series of regional maps, there are two general geographical maps: At the beginning and at the end of the gallery: The decorations on the vaulted ceiling are the work of a group of Mannerist artists including Cesare Nebbia and Girolamo Muziano.

The gallery once displayed the so-called Azuchi Screens, who were gifted by the Japanese shogun Oda Nobunaga to Pope Gregory XIII in 1585.