A rare and little known map of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy taken from Franz Reisser’s Atlas der neuen Geographie published in Vienna in 1813 by the publisher Schulbücher-Verschleiss.
The map describes the Kingdom of Italy in the form it took in its final years, i.e. from 1809 to 1814, after Napoleon united South Tyrol and took Trieste and Istria from it. The rest of central and northern Italy is ‘Kaiserthum Frankreich’. All departments of the Kingdom of Italy are indicated.
The Kingdom of Italy was a state founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805, when, having already become Emperor of the French, he had himself crowned King of Italy on 26 May 1805 in Milan Cathedral. The kingdom replaced the previous Italian Republic (the pre-unification Italian state that existed from 1802 to 1805 and was a political-administrative entity closely dependent on the French Republic) and included much of northern and part of central Italy and had Milan as its capital. The Kingdom did not survive the fall of Napoleon, dissolving in 1814.