Geographer, cartographer, inventor and printer, the Venetian friar Vicenza Coronelli can justly be considered one of the most famous globemakers of the 17th century: the globes he created in 1683 for Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles quickly attracted attention as the largest such objects even produced. Coronelli himself lived most of his life in Venice, at the monastery of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where he founded the Accademia degli Argonauti, considered to be one of the oldest geographical societies in the world. An untiring writer and publisher, in 1690 Coronelli published his Atlante Veneto (including the famous ‘Book of Globes’), which is considered the first atlas to have been produced in Italy. Official cosmographer to the Venetian Republic, Coronelli also combined cartography with work on the first ‘modern-style’ encyclopaedia of geography, unfortunately left unfinished.