Jeannette Power e Benedetto Marzolla. Incroci tra eccellenze “geografiche” nel Sud

Abstract

Jeannette Villepreux Power (1794-1871) has been an important scientist in the 19th century, primarily a marine biologist. Having lived for a long time in Messina, when the city of the Straits played an important cultural and economic role in the Sicily of the time and throughout the Kingdom, she matured a detailed and, in some regards, original knowledge of the region and translated it into a Guide to Sicily published in Naples at Cirelli’s in 1842. The Guide was accompanied by one of the most valuable chorographic maps, a lithograph work by the great cartographer Benedetto Marzolla, namely, the best that could be displayed at that time. There are also three plans or topographies of archaeological sites, Syracuse, Girgenti/Agrigento and Selinunte, the chalcographic work of Gabriello De Sanctis, a well-known cartographer and publishing operator in the Nineteenth Century. Power’s Guide and Marzolla’s map of Sicily show considerable geographical interest for two reasons: the author’s territorial and cultural observations and Marzolla’s technical skill and cartographic artistry, a combination hard to find elsewhere; and a further indication of the vibrancy and validity of the cartographic, geographical and territorial culture pertaining in Naples and the Kingdom (e.g., Messina) in the Nineteenth Century, trends that were dormant and denied after the Unification of Italy.