Livio Sanuto (c. 1520-1576) was a Venetian cartographer and geographer, best known for a monumental work on Africa. He came from a Venetian family connected to the city’s learned and mercantile circles. He is often distinguished from his brother Giulio Sanuto, an engraver, and from other Venetian relatives of the same name.
His reputation rests on the Geografia di M. Livio Sanuto distinta in XII libri, published posthumously in Venice in 1588. The work was intended as a comprehensive world geography, but only the section on Africa was completed. It drew on Portuguese reports, Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi, and the writings of Leo Africanus, and it was considered one of the most detailed accounts of the continent available to a European reader of the period.
The book is prized for its series of large, finely engraved maps of Africa, among the most important produced in sixteenth-century Italy. They reflect the Venetian tradition of fine copperplate engraving and show the growing knowledge of the African interior, including the Nile and the Congo regions.
Today, the Geografia is rare, and individual maps from it are highly sought after by collectors of Italian Renaissance cartography and of early maps of Africa.