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3,393 voyages plotted from the Navigare database (Navigare. Database di viaggi e imbarcazioni tra XIV e XVI secolo), the digital edition of the working notes (schede di lavoro) compiled by the Italian economic historian Federigo Melis (1914–1973) on late-medieval Mediterranean shipping.
Each entry transcribes a single voyage and (where the underlying documents allow) captures the ship type, ship name and nationality, departure and arrival ports, departure and arrival dates, any port-of-call along the way, the merchandise (merce) carried, the people involved (typically the padrone or merchant agents) and the archival source. Most surviving documents identify a port but not a precise date, so only 513 of the 3,393 voyages here carry both endpoints — these are the ones that can be filtered to and colour-coded by duration.
The Navigare project ingested over 7,000 cards from Melis's original collection of 14,000+. The underlying documents are primarily drawn from the Datini Archive in Prato (the same merchant fondaco whose letter network is mapped on the companion Letters page), supplemented by other Italian and Mediterranean state archives.
Search interface: istitutodatini.it/navigare/viaggi
Every port on this map was located through the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), an open scholarly infrastructure hosted at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Center. WHG provides a unified index over major place-name sources — GeoNames, Wikidata, Getty TGN, OpenStreetMap, OpenHistoricalMap, Pleiades — plus contributor-uploaded historical datasets, all reachable through a single Reconciliation Service API compliant with the W3C reconciliation spec. For projects with historical place names that don't sit cleanly inside any one modern source, it is an extraordinarily useful piece of public infrastructure, and we'd encourage anyone doing similar work to reach for it first.
Sign-up and an API token are free for academic and non-commercial use at whgazetteer.org; an OpenRefine reconciliation endpoint is also available for spreadsheet workflows. Browse the project at whgazetteer.org and the technical docs at docs.whgazetteer.org.
The 329 normalised place names in Navigare's luoghi-dizionario were submitted to WHG's reconciliation endpoint in fuzzy mode, country-hinted from the source's region column. Toponyms that returned no hit (Italian exonyms like Marsiglia, Maiorca, Cipro) were re-probed against a small endonym table, then any results still missing a centroid were rescued by walking through the alternate WHG namespaces (gn / wd / osm / tgn) for the same toponym. A hand-curated overrides file holds the residue. The end result: 281 ports mapped; 24 source entries (sea zones and abstract directions like Levante or the open Mediterranean) have no point geometry by design and are not visualised; the remaining 24 were flagged Non identificabile in the source itself.
45 distinct vessel-type tokens appear in the source. Common ones translate cleanly (nave → ship, galea → galley, cocca → cog, caracca → carrack, brigantino → brigantine). Medieval Italian / Genoese / Venetian types with no precise English equivalent (liuto, saettia, vacchetta, rampino…) retain the Italian word with a parenthetical gloss. n.s. abbreviates non specificato (unspecified).
© Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica "F. Datini", Prato. Database compiled from the Federigo Melis archive. Map visualisation by this project, code at github.com/docuracy/datini.