Abstract

After summarising data and events relating to the figure of the Jesuit Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607), a pioneer of the period of encounter between East and West in the Modern Age, and his project, which remained at the manuscript stage, to publish the first Western atlas of China, the article analyses in detail, on the basis of the materials that now exist at the State Archives in Rome, the missionary’s working methodology, based on Chinese cartographic sources, their enlargement and transliteration of the toponyms contained therein, and cartographic tracing. Following these operations, a further phase would have seen a professional cartographer succeed Ruggieri in the processing of the maps, which, thus finished, would finally be passed on to the engraver for the copperplate engraving (the latter phase was never completed due to Ruggieri’s death). Further topics addressed are an estimate of Ruggieri’s materials connected to the atlas that were originally intended to be present among the working materials, but which are now destroyed or missing, some epistemological reflections on the nature of the cartography of the atlas, and, finally, some notes on what graphic layout and impact Ruggieri’s atlas would have had if published.