Rosette volcano as Vesuvius

[-JKP-]

So that is not a no.

I guess we have to remain open to other possibilities until there is a correlation with the text. But i see most of what you are describing as fitting.

I don't actually see Naples, i see it filling in for the entire Italian peninsula. But that rosette has other morphs for me, as do the others.

That's on my list too. I have a list of about a dozen locations that seemed to "work" better with the features on the "map than others. It's not quite as high on the list as Naples (by Naples, I am including "greater" Naples, with the thermal vents and craters around it, and the island of Nisida, and island with the lighthouse).

Imagine a camera with a zoom lens. Focus it just southeast of Naples (so it includes Naples), and then zoom back a bit to take in a wider area so that Naples and part of the southeast side of the boot are included, south of Bari (in addition to Salerno and Naples, Bari was one of the areas that attracted medical scholars in those days). That area southeast is a spa region with pools and grottoes, green and blue water, and a lot of mosaics with ancient illustrations (astrology, sea life, plants). Very multicultural, with a very interesting history.

In the early days, I tried very hard to fit the map to Jerusalem, Genoa, Tivoli, a couple of towns on the Black See, Tunisia, and Venice (and about 300 other towns around the entire coastline of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Meso-America). I even tried some of the old trading cities around the coast of India.

At first I deliberately ignored the suns and the T-O (even though they are orientation symbols, I wasn't sure if they were intended to be interpreted that way in the VMS, in fact, I'm STILL not absolutely certain that is their function). I turned the "map" every possible way, considered every possible interpretation for the different shapes, tried to vary my perception of scale (was the "camera" zoomed in or zoomed out? were the "trails" between the rosettes short or longer than is indicated in the drawings?) but I could never quite find as many "matches" as I could for a small number that gradually worked their way to the top of the list.

I was hoping Tivoli would come to the top. It had enough "resonance" with the VMS "map" that I spent more a year trying to reconcile its features with the rosettes. It has swimming holes, green and blue water, craggy parts, escarpments, fountains, waterfalls. It even has a winding road along the steep section in somewhat the same place as the winding pathway on the "map". It has a LOT of hits but... in the end I didn't feel there were enough. Some things didn't add up.

Sicily worked a little better than Tivoli, but volcanic eruptions have completely altered the position of the towns and the shape of the coastline, so it's harder to assess what it looked like it those days.


I also considered that each of the rosettes might be hundreds of miles apart, landmarks in a long journey, but that's discouraging, because then it could be anywhere and hard to pinpoint the details. And I'm not discounting the possibility that it might be a metaphorical map, but I'm HOPING it's a geographical map.