Zolfo Rosso is an experimental historical poem that re-imagines a fragment of Mediterranean history.
12th-century, Sicily. Geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi is composing an atlas of the ‘known world’, commissioned by King Roger II. While three scribes narrate a poetic history of the map, the geographer travels beyond physical horizons to chart the limits of the Earth, and his journey toward the king’s palace fragments with dream-like encounters.
Kitab Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (the book of the Pleasure Excursion of One Who Is Eager to Traverse the Horizons) or Latinised Tabula Rogeriana (the book of Roger), is considered the most comprehensive work of Medieval geography. Al-Idrīsī completed the book in January 1154, shortly before Roger’s death. In compiling it, al-Idrīsī combined material from Arabic and Greek geographic works with information obtained through firsthand observation and eyewitness reports.
The Medici press in Rome published an abridgement of Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq in 1592; a Latin translation was published under the title Geographia Nubiensis. A German scholar, Konrad Miller, published the maps in his Mappe Arabicae (1926–31), and later an emended world map, based upon Miller’s work, was published by the Iraq Academy (Baghdad, 1951).
‘We are about to begin a drift that is not yet written on our maps. The North becomes the South, the West becomes the East…’