Political tides shaping cartographers' craft

IMPRUNETA, Italy -- It has been said that wars are a way of teaching geography. And maps are caught up in the strife.

"The problems of cartography are the same that exist in diplomatic relations," said Stefano Strata, codirector of Nova Rico, which has been producing custom globes for 50 years in Impruneta, near Florence.

For such mapmakers as Nova Rico, disputes over geography are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is shown split in two, a division that Greek Cypriots do not recognize. In one globe, Chile gets parts of Antarctica that on another globe go to Argentina. And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.

"Maps aren't faithful portraits of reality but subjective constructions," said Vladimiro Valerio, a specialist in the history of cartography on the architectural faculty at the University of Venice. "Maps reflect the design for which they are to be used. They reflect who commissioned it."

In sum, he said, "cartographers don't lie, but they take a position."

When working on a commission, Strata and his business partner, Riccardo Donati, get precise instructions, sometimes at the governmental level. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, then the president of Iraq, commissioned Nova Rico to draft a globe with all Arab countries colored orange and the rest of the world yellow. Iraqi military advisers visited Impruneta to monitor production.

"It was clearly a political globe," Strata said.

Most of Nova Rico's production, which is more than a million globes a year, goes to the European market and are of a standard type.

In any case, Donati said, "no one ever asked us to make their country bigger."

To Valerio, "all maps are good, but they are all different."

"And in this difference," he said, "you get a glimpse of our past and present."

Maps have existed for millennia, ever since human beings began to track where the hunting was good or which pass was safe.

Three centuries ago, "political bounaries were not as defined on maps in many instances, as they are now, and were often more fluid in practice, so cartographers did not give them the same level of attention that they do now," said James Akerman of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

But changes like the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fragmentation of Yugoslavia have required flexibility from Nova Rico, which is one of Europe's few remaining globe makers, and other cartographers.

The computer age has also revolutionized cartography, as have such programs as Google Earth. But cartography lovers say there is nothing like an atlas or a globe.

"Part of the attraction is having them as objects, for their appeal or pleasure or as a signal of status," said Akerman, director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, which is part of the Newberry Library.

The Internet, he said, will never replace the act of poring over a map to plan a trip.

"Navigation is about more than going from one point to the next," he said. "It's about fulfilling one's aspirations."