• Book

    • Albano Marcarini     

      The Pointless World Atlas

      100 Places that didn’t make History

    • The Pointless World Atlas
      • Overview
      • About the author
    • Albano Marcarini     

      The Pointless World Atlas

      100 Places that didn’t make History

      • Overview
      • About the author

      Overview

      This is an atlas of geographically sorted geo-political anomalies of past and present. The charts are just ambiguous enough to make you second-guess them – it is up to you to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. You can even just go with the flow – after all, we know that when it comes to outdoing fiction, nothing beats fact.

      The atlas consists of one hundred double-page charts. The left-hand page features the chart’s title, its geographical coordinates, its location on the map and its story; the right-hand page features the chart’s cartographic details created by the author himself by borrowing from a variety of sources. Rounding out the book is a guide on how to get to the places described in the book itself, a bibliography and an index of geographical names.

      This atlas was created out of a sincere desire for revenge against all the architects, surveyors, astronauts, programmers, despots and tyrants who insist on favouring the concept of space – or, even worse, cyberspace – over that of place. The author’s incurable illness is, in fact, recognised by science under the name “topophilia”, i.e. love of place.

      About the author

      Albano Marcarini is an urban planner from Milan. He writes travel guides and travels thousands of miles every year to discover forgotten places. He draws and collects old topographical maps – the only ones capable of giving him the coordinates of lost journeys. He has edited various atlases for De Agostini, Touring Club Italiano and Istituto Geografico Militare. He offers his followers dozens of itineraries on the website www.sentieridautore.it.

  • Volumes that make up the book