Giacomo Foresti was an Italian writer and compiler active in the late fifteenth century, best known for helping to shape the earliest printed historical and geographical world-views. Though not a cartographer in the modern sense, he matters to map history for the way his work transmitted inherited geographic knowledge in the formative decades of European printing.

He is chiefly associated with the widely circulated chronicle commonly known as the Supplementum Chronicarum, first issued in Venice in 1483 and subsequently reprinted in a number of editions. The book’s combination of universal history, place-names and descriptive geography provided a framework in which readers encountered the world as a coherent, ordered whole, and it belongs to the same intellectual context as early printed maps and cosmographies.

Foresti’s reputation in the trade rests on these editions as vehicles of information rather than on original surveying. As such, his name is encountered in catalogues of early geographical printing, where text and image together formed the foundations of Renaissance cartographic culture.

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