For a short time in the middle of the sixteenth century, in the period between the publication of Munster’s Geographia (1540) and the Ortelius Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in Antwerp (1570), the increasing demand for sheet maps was met by engravers and publishers in Rome and Venice, one of whom was Paolo Forlani. It became the practice in those cities to issue in one volume maps by various cartographers, the maps varying in shape and size but being bound in uniform style and usually arranged in standard ‘Ptolemaic’ order.