Mankind has always been concerned with exploration and discovery. A curiosity and a need for security in what concerns our surroundings were what began our journey as explorers. Surroundings that needed to be known, tamed, defined. And so, mountains that bordered plains, rivers that linked continents and new mysteries were uncovered. The last tens of thousands of years saw mankind adapting, but also sacrificing a distant past – the original lands buried in ancient mythologies. Mythologies that have tried to familiarise us with distant and unknown spaces. Later on, human nature wished to represent the familiar and then the explored space, so the first steps in cartography were taken. With this step having been taken, we emerged from mythology. And the most important mapping tool on the historical scale was the invention of cities and urban life.
This cartographic narrative aims to include in a common representation what mankind understands to explore through three great paths that it is concerned with and attached to, contained in what we call Geography, Astronomy and Biology. Let us try to look at them and follow them as the synchronous concern of the great human adventure of knowing itself. All three started at the same time, as even the ancients were preoccupied with astronomy and biology, but the technology of the last century has brought us out of the millennial chiaroscuro, after we became able to easily overcome the geographical barriers of the world we live in.
Throughout the exhibition, three main themes that mankind has invented and perfected as areas of permanent concern are identified: Geography, Astronomy and Biology. Some landmarks of symbolic cartography have been chosen, in order to be more easily circumstantiated historically and scientifically, for the general public. The most important objective is to show the image of a fundamental link between the overlapping layers of the world we live in: the earth, the sky and the inner worlds of our bodies. They, in turn, have been closely connected since the beginning of the world, and live in complete harmony in order to nourish and preserve life.