Florence.

To Europeans who dreamed of finding a sea route to Asian markets, questions regarding what lay beyond the familiar waters of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe were matters of utmost importance. The size and relative positions of the earth's major landmasses and bodies of water became issues of particularly vigorous discussion and debate among the Renaissance scholars of early-fifteenth-century Italy. In the absence of reliable maps and concrete data, however, such debates drew almost entirely from hearsay, speculation, and the supposedly well-informed writings of ancient Roman geographers. As in many fields of Renaissance cultural achievement, the city of Florence functioned as the center of the fifteenth century's revolution in geographical thought. Interest in such issues among Florentine scholars derived in part from commercial interests and in part from the "recovery" of two...