Heading to Italy in the Early Modern Period. Francesco Scoto’s Early Modern Italian Travel Manuals Geodataset (1650–1700)

Context

The main objective of our research was to analyze the travel manual, which was an integral part of Scoto’s guidebook, and publish geodatasets which allow for mapping spatial information provided as a structured text. As part of Beyond the Horizon project, Scoto’s guidebook was chosen – as one of the titles of wayfinding literature, or chorographies in general, which we refer to as mundane historical sources – to be explored in detail, in all its preserved editions and forms. We use mundane historical sources containing spatial information to refine the routes of specific travelers from the Czech Lands in the 17th and 18th centuries recorded in ego documents (travel diaries, sets of letters, alba amicorum, travel accounts). This “Matching Page to the Path Method” is characterized by applying provenance search: searching for the corresponding travel manual in the relevant family library.

Reading Francesco Scoto’s Guidebook

Scoto’s book, published often under the name of Francesco’s brother Andrea,³ underwent complex development. At the beginning of the 17th century, parts added by Girolamo da Capugnano (and possibly other authors or publishers) were a significant enrichment. It was published in Latin, Italian, French, and English (Ciambella, 2019), with a significant predominance of Italian editions produced on the Apennine Peninsula (Table 1).

The core of the book consists of three chapters – on northern and central Italy, Rome, and the journey from Rome to Naples. This is followed by chapters on the islands (Sicily, Malta), a separate chapter on Lazio, and in some editions, a description of the journey to Palestine or a brief excerpt from chorographic and geographical writings. In addition to the text, there is a map of the Apennine Peninsula (based on Giacomo Gastaldi’s map of Italy, 1561 (Almagià, 1932; Bifolco, 2014)) and vedute.

Step 1: Data Sources Selection

The Italian-language editions published in Italy in the second half of the 17th century were selected for analysis: the one of 1650,⁵ two of 1675, with the first published by Giovanni Pietro Brigonci in Venice,⁶ and the second by Cadorini (Bolzetta), and the one of 1700⁷ (which, with the exception of the title page, is identical to the 1699 edition⁸). The Italian-language editions proved to be the most popular among the aristocracy in the Czech Lands. At the same time, the selected sample represents the most active publishing houses as well as locations in Italy related to Scoto’s guidebook. Finally, the selected editions correspond to the Jubilee Years, which makes it easy to map the most frequently traveled routes during these years – which were the busiest in terms of long-distance travel across Europe. Each edition was searched with at least two different copies and in physical form.⁹ The aim was to determine two aspects:

1. apply the “Matching Page to Path Method” aiming at assigning specific travellers their wayfinding literature;

2. describe the book’s transformation over time. Generally, regardless the genre, at least part of each print run was sold as an unbound collection – individual copies have different arrangements. Comparing two or more copies of an edition of a book, maps and vedute appear on different places eventhough their places are indicated in a list of figures (Brückner, 2024). Studies of Scoto’s guidebook, starting from the 1601 edition, confirm this. In addition, there were damage and loss, which, in the absence of a list of figures in most editions, does not allow for an accurate picture of the whole to be compiled.

Step 2: Data Mining

Although history of travel and travel writing receives constant attention by scholars of various disciplins (Parson, 2007; Hendrix, 2014; van der Helm, 2014; Das & Youngs, 2019; Cianarella, 2025), travel and postal manuals have until recently been nearly overlooked (Midura, 2021). Yet they represent a typical way of recording spatial information for the period (Arbellot, 1992; Delano-Smith, 2006; Akerman & Karrow, 2007). Their main features include concise and structured entries essential for planning a journey and moving around, i.e., a list of consecutive locations with their (inconsistently provided) characteristics and information about the distance between them. These are grouped into chapters representing routes between major cities. It is therefore a very schematic representation of space in the form of points and lines connecting them, with occasional comments such as on the state of the roads, risks (difficult river crossings) and borders between individual states.

Step 3: Structure of Dataset

The structure of the dataset was designed to reflect the form of the analyzed document as closely as possible. The travel (Table 2) manual included in the studied editions of Scoto’s guidebook encompassed from 12 to 15 print pages. Narrative sections were also recorded as “prose” in LineType. The data in the table was transcribed manually for the first copy and studied and modified when working with each subsequent copy. Automatic text-recognition workflows (PERO OCR, Transkribus) were tested but not adopted. Due to historical typography, inconsistent spelling, abbreviations, and page condition, correction time was comparable to manual transcription. A key step was the completion of locations for geocoding, which is recorded in four separate columns. Location_original provides a transcription of the source, while Location_extracted also includes locations provided by us, taken from headings or narrative sections that supplement the individual route chapters (RouteDescription). These are usually the starting and/or ending destinations. This step is crucial for both mapping individual routes and for the systematic recording and calculation of distances between locations. The final step in this phase, already at the level of interpretation of the primary source, was to determine the aforementioned locality: Location_current.¹⁰ In justified cases, we also record the historical form of the toponym in Location_alt.

Step 4: Geocoding

Geocoding was carried out using a central gazetteer maintained within our project database and linked to the extracted Scoto itinerary tables. This gazetteer is part of the “Beyond the Horizon” project’s broader spatial data infrastructure.

For each edition, the transcribed table was first compared with the gazetteer to identify locations that had been resolved in previous datasets. Matching records inherited their existing GeoNames identifiers and coordinates from the gazetteer. Only unmatched place names required a new geocoding. These were processed using a Google Apps Script and the GeoNames API to query standardised place names and country context, where available. Successfully matched locations were added to the central gazetteer to enable consistent reuse across all subsequent editions and related datasets.

Step 5: Quality Control

Quality control involved a combination of distance-based checks and visual verification in a geographic information system (GIS). First, distances between consecutive geocoded locations were calculated using the Haversine formula. Scoto records distances in historical units (posta), which denoted the time or effort required to travel rather than a fixed ground distance, so the same nominal value of one posta corresponded to a shorter physical distance over difficult terrain than over a flat plain. Because conversion of such units to the metric system is consequently not unambiguous and appears to have varied over time and space, these checks were employed as heuristic warnings rather than fixed exclusion rules. Second, the geocoded table was imported into GIS, where point locations were connected by lines based on route names (chapters). This step helped identify locations that deviated from the logical sequence of the route, as well as cases where the author probably switched the order of the stops. The key stages of data processing are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Locations that could not be identified with sufficient confidence were preserved in the published tables without GeoNames identifiers or coordinates. The resulting geocoded dataset (see Table 3 for geocoding results) enables route reconstruction, comparison across four editions (1650, both 1675 editions, and 1700), network density analysis, and visualisation in GIS environments.

Repository name

Zenodo

Object name

Early Modern Italian Travel Manuals Geodataset (Francesco Scoto, 1650–1700)

Data files included

Four CSV tables representing editions (SF1650.csv, SF1675_01.csv, SF1675_02.csv, SF1700.csv), one documentation file (README.txt).

Format names and versions

CSV (UTF-8), TXT documentation.

Creation dates

2025-01-01 to 2026-04-28

Dataset creators

Eva Chodějovská (Beyond the Horizon Project, Moravian Library, Brno); Josef Münzberger (Beyond the Horizon Project, Moravian Library, Brno).

Language

English (field names and metadata); Italian, Latin, French, German, and English (source toponyms and route titles as recorded in the printed editions).

License

CC BY 4.0

Publication date

2026-04-30

Number of records

2,597 total rows across four editions; 1,773 geocodable location entries.

Spatial coverage

Italian Peninsula and adjacent transalpine connections represented in Scoto’s itineraries.

Temporal coverage

Editions 1650, 1675 (two versions), 1700.

Primary identifiers

GeoNames IDs for resolved locations; unresolved records remain without coordinates.

The dataset is available via Zenodo at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19909381