Teaching Geography: A Never-Ending Dialogue Between Late Antique and Renaissance Europe

The purpose of this article is to show how the dialogue between Antique and Renaissance geography did not happen only through the rediscovery and critical study of ancient sources by Italian and European humanists. Such a reading would leave out the contribution of the Late Antique period, namely early Christianity. It is not possible to dismiss the incorporation of theological elements in geographical disciplines as a simple anti-scientific fact. The great cartographers of the Renaissance, including Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator, just to name the most famous, considered the religious dimension an essential component of geography. In this article I would like to hint at the importance of this red thread between different epochs, underlining the importance of how the Christian thought of the first centuries must be taken into account as much as the technical mathematical element of classicism in the emergence of modern geography between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.