A very rare modern map of Russia showing the region between the Black Sea with a recognisable Crimean peninsula to the Caspian Sea in the east. One of the earliest modern maps of Russia. It extends northwards encompassing all of European Russia. Bagrow praised the map considerably and discusses the maps origins as “an unpublished sketch by Paulus Giovio”. It appears to be related to that of Dmitriy Gerasimov in the atlases of Battista Agnese. It was published in Giacomo Gastaldi’s influential edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’. Gastaldi was arguably the greatest Italian cartographer of the sixteenth century. It is also the world’s first printed pocket atlas, and the first to use a mechanism to hold the plates in position so that the impression was good and level. Bagrow pp. 64 & 86-8; Karrow, R.W. (16 c.) 30/41; Nordenskiold Collection 214; Phillips, P.L. (Atlases) 369; Shirley ‘Atlases in the BL’ T.Ptol 9a.