Giuseppe Rosaccio's 'Universale Descrittione di Tuto il Mondo' is the largest Italian world map published in the sixteenth century, here in its fifth and final state, published by the Remondini family of Bassano.

"The first Italian mappemonde of importance for over thirty years” (Shirley), and very rare, this large wall-map was engraved by Giovanni Battista Mazza. The map measures about three and a half by six feet. A highly decorative map, it includes large vignettes of American Indian life after those of Theodor De Bry's engravings of the drawings of Jacques Le Moyne and John White. When the map was first published, in 1597, they were the first use of these ethnographic illustrations on any printed map. Roanoke Colony, the first English settlement in America, which Thomas Hariot describes in de Bry’s ‘Grand Voyages’, is cited on the map in three separate legends.

Similarly, the depiction in each corner of a woman representing one of the four continents of the world, is also early, having been introduced by Petrus Plancius in 1594. In a variation on Plancius, each vignette employs the continent's most important cities as a backdrop, which are among the largest on any Italian map published in the sixteenth century.

One year before the publication of his map, Rosaccio issued a pamphlet, 'Il Mondo e sue parti', Verona 1596, which outlines his sources for the geography of the map. A catalogue of prominent cartographers and explorers concludes with "following as closely as possible the prince of cosmographers, Ptolemy, [I have created] the present 'mappamondo', with the example of the work of Gastaldi and Abraham Ortelius before me, in the form which you now see, a form which is closer to the shape of a sphere than any other". Rather strangely, Petrus Plancius, one of the more obvious of Rosaccio's sources, is not identified by him as such. Nevertheless, the geography for America closely follows Plancius' 1594 map as well as his influential 1592 wall map of the world. Rosaccio also draws on Plancius for much of his depiction of the Far East and New Guinea, which is shown as an island on the left side of the map.

Rosaccio claims in the notes placed above and below the map that the task of producing the planisphere was far from easy, and in the course of the project, he had "found it necessary to make personal visits to many distant countries" in the interests of geography. Rosaccio faithfully relied on the works of his predecessors as he travelled from country to country. "I would have gained little advantage from them had I not been able to learn much from men experienced in the science of Cosmography." It is not known which countries he visited and no other references to these travels exist.

Rosaccio’s map is surprisingly rare: the only examples in American institutions are at the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale and Texas. Neither the British Library, nor the Bibliotheque Nationale have examples. At the end of the nineteenth century, only a single example was known, at the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam. That edition, the same as this one, was first described in 1899 in 'Frontières Entre le Brésil et La Guyane Français, Second Mémoire'. In 1923, Dr. F. C. Wieder, the great Dutch historian of cartography, again came across the map while pursuing research at the Maritime Museum library. Not knowing what it was and brought the 'mappamondo' to the attention of his friend Roberto Almagia, the curator of maps at the Vatican and an expert on Italian cartography. In his 'Rivista Geographica Italiana' (1924), Almagia described the map for the first time.
The first edition of 1597 is now known, in one example, discovered at Vaduz Castle in the collection of Prince Liechtenstein. In 1949, H.P. Kraus purchased the prince's entire map collection, describing it as "without exaggeration...the largest, finest collection of maps in private hands at that time". The twelve most spectacular maps from the collection, were featured in Kraus's catalogue 56, 'Choice Manuscripts Books Maps and Globes', and exhibited in 1951 at his gallery on 46th Street in New York City. "It was quite an impressive show," Kraus immodestly wrote, "especially the wall maps of the world by Vopell, Venice, 1558, and Rosaccio, Venice, 1597, and the epochal Vespucci world map of 1524". All twelve maps were purchased by Curt Reisinger of the Anheuser-Busch family, and donated to Harvard.

Kraus described Rosaccio as "an outstanding Renaissance cosmographer”, and "authority on Ptolemy's 'Geography'", and his "map gives very detailed information on North America".

In 1954, a third copy of the map appeared in an exhibition at the Marciana Library in Venice. Entitled ‘Asia in the Cartography of the West’, the map depicts Marco Polo's ship sailing to a lesser Java island on its way to the King of Tartary in 1290. That example probably belonged to Franco Novacco, who lent a number of maps from his collection, and then sold his entire collection to the Newberry Library in Chicago. Like the map in Rotterdam, and the present example, the Novacco Rosaccio bears the date 1657, in the centre of the map.

In 1965, H.P. Kraus acquired another example of Rosaccio’s map, and included it in his 'Monumenta Cartographia', catalogue 124. Dated "after 1642, but before 1647, Kraus describes the map in his catalogue: "Rosaccio's huge world map is his 'magnum opus', and ranks as a masterpiece among that type of great wall maps which were among his age's contribution to geographical study. As such, it is among the last to use the oval projection that before 1600 was considered especially suitable for the purpose, first calculated in the ratio of 1:2 for the mean meridian's relation to the equator (as here) by Leonardo da Vinci, and first used in a published map by Benedetto Bordone in 1528". The University of Texas purchased the entire contents of the 'Monumenta Cartographia' catalogue, so this Rosaccio map is now in Austin, Texas.

In his description, Kraus pointed out that there was another example at Yale, in a collection of some 3000 maps that the university had purchased from Louis C. Karpinski. That map had been in the collection of Franz Ritter von Wieser, a renowned historian of cartography and Professor at the University of Vienna, who, among his many accomplishments, had in 1901 been the first person to announce the discovery of the most sought-after map of all time, the famous Martin Waldseemuller wall map of 1507 that was the first to name America.

Shirley identifies a total of five states of the Rosaccio planisphere, a single copy of each of the first four states is recorded. Harvard possesses the unique copy of state one, which shows Tierra del Fuego joined to the southern continent. An example at the Library of Congress, and the one at the University of Texas are the only specimens of states two and three, but it is not certain which precedes the other. Both preserve the date 1597 but have alterations and were printed around 1620. They show Tierra del Fuego separated from the southern continent by a strait. The map at Texas has a dedication; on the other the dedicatory cartouche is blank, which we believe has precedence, and therefore the map in Texas is in the second state. The copy at Yale is dated 1647 and is considered the fourth state. The fifth, published in 1657 by Remondini, is the one usually found, accounting for four - or half - of the eight recorded examples: the Newberry Library, the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, the copy in Venice and this one from a private collection exhibited at Scandinavia House in New York in 2002.