Gallery of Maps

A hall on the third floor of the Vatican Palace, a hundred and twenty metres long and six wide, with forty painted maps of the Italian peninsula running down both walls. Above them, a gilded barrel vault. Almost everyone who walks toward the Sistine Chapel passes through here, and almost everyone slows down. The maps were painted between 1580 and 1583, surveyed by Ignazio Danti, a Dominican friar from Perugia, before the country we now call Italy existed in name. From one end of the room, Liguria. From the other, Sicily, viewed from the sea.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.