Host Dave Schlom visits with best-selling author and award-winning anthropologist Meredith F. Small to talk about her new book, Here Begins The Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of The World.
The Fra Mauro map, created by a team led by the lay monk Fra Mauro from 1450-1459 in Venice, is a masterpiece of art, cartography, and culture and arguably the first scientific map of the planet. It's astonishing in not just its accuracy for the time (NASA has even shown it next to orbital images to show it's amazing fidelity), but it's also a beautiful work of art and provides a glimpse into the state of geographic knowledge as the middle ages fully transitioned to the renaissance and the age of exploration.
There's even an interesting connection to the Apollo Program. The region on the moon where Apollo 13 was supposed to land, and Apollo 14 eventually did, is named Fra Mauro for the Venetian cartographer.
