Author: Albano Marcarini

This atlas is all about the world’s most breath-taking mountains, from Olympus to Ararat. Get ready to plot your perfect tours and travels – even just in your mind.

Mountains have always aroused enormous and sometimes conflicting sensations: astonishment, wonder, power, fear, ambition, holiness and closeness to God, respect or conquest, and even the unknown – but hardly ever indifference. Some mountains are imbued with an aura even higher than their own staggering heights.

They are sacred, mythical, or idealised. No region in the world is without mountains; all peoples have their own. Each mountain has its own story and narration: Olympus, the home of the Gods; Calamita, a place of arcane power; Kailas, a destination for pilgrims; Ararat, the final refuge; or Sinai, the revelation. These mountains are arcane in Leopardi’s sense of the word: the secrecy and mystery surrounding them inspires fascination or attraction.

Written with the same easy-going style of Atlante inutile del mondo, the book features custom cartographic tables and watercolours as well as an appendix which, as in the former publication, functions as an in-depth examination and guide for each destination.

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.