El orbe a sus pies

Magellan is responsible for finding the narrow "passage" that joins the Atlantic and the Pacific, with which he circumvented the wall that the American continent represented for navigation. But the one who really went around the Earth and turned into an experience what until then was nothing more than a mathematical concept was the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano, who crossed the Indian Ocean and bordered the African continent through the Atlantic without making stops. The sphericity of the terrestrial orb, whose circumference Eratosthenes already measured with surprising precision in the 3rd century BC. C., had been visited for the first time by man. Eighteen centuries separate the cosmographic concept of the sphericity of the globe from the circumnavigation experience, which was made possible thanks to a series of geostrategic, technological, doctrinal and institutional conditions, which this extraordinary book deals with. It is about, in the words of the cosmographer Pedro de Medina, knowing "this subtlety so great that a man with a compass and some lines indicated on a chart knows how to go around the world".