There are twenty-seven recorded institutional examples of portolan charts and atlases by Placido Caloiro e Oliva.

Oliva’s chart adapts the medieval portolan style to the techniques of early-modern navigation. The main body of the chart is divided into two parts to show both the medieval and more 'modern' corrected coastlines of the Mediterranean, enabling the viewer to compare them directly. The corrected axis shows Crete and Cyprus aligned on the same parallel.

The Sunderland Collection

This is a very unusual double portolan chart of the Mediterranean by the celebrated cartographer Placido Caloira e Oliva, likely in collaboration with Joan Oliva. Presenting the medieval and the modern in parallel, Oliva has chosen to showcase the two maps on one sheet in the luxurious portolan ‘antiqued’ style as opposed to using intaglio printing. This opulent illuminated manuscript style is an informed artistic decision and a nod to earlier decadent works, but here, includes the latest geographical ‘discoveries’ and more functional navigational advice.

Placido Caloira e Oliva was a leading member of the Oliva family, a cartographic dynasty who dominated portolan chart production in Europe during the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Charts signed by no fewer than sixteen different members of the Oliva family have been recorded between 1538 and 1673.

A very attractive but unusual double portolan chart of the Mediterranean. "[This] portolan represents a committed attempt to adapt an honoured but by then obsolete tool, the medieval portolan, to the facts of early-modern navigation. It shows the features of a traditional portolan, with ample space for medieval bestiary and typified representations of places, but also a chart which records the relative positions of land masses more accurately than the traditionally-calculated angles." (Wilson, 2020).

Oliva's 'Doppia' Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean