Summary

Nowadays globes are an important subject to study both for their history, their cartographic content and their artistic aspects. Moreover some softwares, such as Google Earth, Virtual Globe and many others, are very widespread because of their usability and, above all, because they represent a complex object, the Earth, in a intelligible way. This works deals with the possibility of applying digital technologies to the cartographic globes, especially Coronelli.s one, to obtain a virtual copy to navigate and to query. Cartographic spheres, terrestrial and celestial, have aroused a big interest both for their artistic fea-tures and for different application and function they were planned. Anyway the first and the most im-portant interest about these objects is concerning their application as a cartographic tool for naviga-tion, for astronomy and, above all, for geography and geodesy studying. Moreover the possibility of representing the earth in a 3d view makes these objects almost unique: in fact they give an intuitive and immediate understanding of an “object ” (the sphere) that cannot be represented in many other ways. One of the most representative globe-makers of the 17th century is the monk Vincenzo Maria Coro-nelli. He is well-known for the production of many maps and for a big project of an encyclopedia but