Island
Insula Galliata
L’Ile de la Galite (Barrinigton) · Galita (Miller)
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Insula Galliata is today's La Galite, a small island of volcanic rock off the north coast of Tunisia, between Sardinia and the African shore. Because the map squeezes the Mediterranean so hard, the island ends up drawn between two islands that lie off Italy, far from the African coast it really belongs to. The geographer Ptolemy called it Kalathe, and the Roman writer Pliny claimed that scorpions could not survive on its soil, a belief sailors were still repeating many centuries later. Its name lived on in medieval sea charts and on great world maps such as those of Ebstorf and Hereford.