That he visited Italy is borne out by his celebrated Itinerarium per nonnullas Galliae Belgicae partes. Ortelius also literally travelled in search of history.
![abraham ortelius abraham ortelius](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1487178295523397637/ipRMWrmO_400x400.jpg)
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And in the texts which accompanied his maps, he always listed the sources he used. With the help of his celebrated museum collection, including an extensive library and rich array of Roman coins, he reconstructed – among other things – Caesar’s conquest of Gall, and the journeys of Odysseus, Aeneas and the Argonauts. And again in his Parergon, a collection of his historical maps that he had previously published in various editions of the Theatrum, he portrays ancient history, sacred and secular, and shows the extent of the Roman Empire in Europe. In his first edition of the Theatrum, he already refers to place names in antiquity, and this subsequently results in a separate publication in 1587, the Thesaurus Geographicus. Ortelius also had a passionate interest in the history of classical antiquity and Biblical history. He is also believed to be the first person to have questioned the early historical maps, proposing instead that the continents had been joined together before drifting apart to their current position. Ortelius is generally recognised as having created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terarum (Theatre of the World), published in Antwerp in 1570. Information from the museum, 27 January 2015