Storia delle Azzorre quali Insulae solis o Isole del sole nella cartografia del XVI secolo

This article examines an unstudied episode in history of the toponymy of the Azores: a number of sixteenth-century maps label the islands the Insulae solis, or Islands of the Sun. Following a brief discussion of «islands of the sun» in classical literature, the author suggests that this name for the Azores derived ultimately from an eleventh-century text describing the visit of one Trezenzonio to a mythical paradise island in the Atlantic, which was called the Great Island of the Solistice – which island appears on the late eleventh-century Burgo de Osma Beatus map. The Azores are first labeled «insulae solis» on the «King-Hamy» map of c. 1502, and subsequently on the «Kunstmann II» world map of 1502-1506, an anonymous map in British Library Add. MS 31316, f. 5, Johann Schöner’s 1520 globe, an anonymous world map of c. 1530 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Borgiano II); and on an anonymous map of c. 1530 in a Latin manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography (BAV, MS Urb. Lat. 274, ff. 73v-74r). This name for the Azores is common in the atlases produced by Battista Agnese, who worked in Venice between 1536 and 1564, and in the atlases of Agnese’s pupil Francesco Ghisolfi (or Gisolfo). The toponym finally disappeared from maps in the seventeenth century.