Paola Corini and Luca De Santis founded Cartography in Milan in 2016 with a conviction they print on every issue: leaving is our best way to understand the world. The large-format biannual magazine devotes each edition to three trips — the first lasting two weeks, the second eight days, the third a quick five-day getaway — explored through documentary photography, long-form writing, and day-by-day itineraries that function simultaneously as reading material and practical guides.
Each destination is studied for months before the team arrives. The research shapes what they look for, but the encounters shape what they find. Issue four took them to Japan, South Dakota, and Venice, where they wrote about Japanese fisherwomen who dive underwater by holding their breath for a living and about Venice’s eerie unfamiliarity when experienced outside the tourist gaze. In Tahiti, they followed junior elder Hervé Maraetaata deep into the Papenoo Valley, the biggest caldera of the volcano, for a conversation about faith, ancestors, and humanity’s changing relationship to belief. A film, Croyance, came out of that journey. Eleven issues in, the magazine has mapped destinations from Uzbekistan and the Amazon jungle to Greenland, South Korea, and the Alentejo.
Published in both Italian and English and distributed in sixteen countries, Cartography treats travel as a form of storytelling — each destination a chapter, each itinerary a plot, each photograph a sentence in a larger narrative about what it means to arrive somewhere unfamiliar and pay attention. Corini and De Santis serve as editors-in-chief and creative directors, and their approach is personal enough that every issue feels like a document of two people learning to see the world, one trip at a time.
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