The Fantastic Map of Frisland

Alejandro Polanco Masa
9 min readJun 19, 2024

In the wide world of maps describing fantastic or ghost islands, there are some that are true works of art and have a lot of history behind them. One such map is that of Nicolò Zeno the Younger, in which the author was supposed to collect the cartographic knowledge of his ancestors. We are dealing with a very detailed map of the coasts of the North Atlantic in a document first seen in Venice around 1558, edited by the printer and typographer Francesco Marcolini, together with an epistolary narrating a series of voyages through the northern seas to the coasts of America.

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