In 1524, Hernán Cortés, responding to the King of Spain—who was also the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, wrote a lengthy, self-exonerating letter after the monarch sent an army to punish him for conquering Mexico against direct orders. Along with the letter, Cortés included a map of the city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexica Empire. The city was built on an island within a lake system and connected to the mainland by three wooden bridges. Years later, after the temples were destroyed and the lakes drained, Mexico City would rise from its ruins. 

This sketch map by Cortés, for many years the only one available, was quickly reprinted by Nuremberg publishers and, through the book trade, made its way to Venice.

In the 16th century, Venice was still a thriving city but had been cut off from the commercial conquests of Spain and Portugal in what was called the "New World", a land of riverine gold that ignited the imaginations of merchants and sailors. In Italy, however, such fantasies remained just that. For Venetian ships, the new trade routes were inaccessible due to both Spanish and Portuguese cannon fire and a strict state secrecy that protected navigational maps. 

As a result, the cartographers of the Serenissima, no longer busy with caravels, offered their services to the booming print industry in the lagoon. In 1528, Benedetto Bordone, renowned for his meticulously detailed maps, published an *Isolario* (Island Book) in which the woodcut of the city of Tenochtitlán (labeled “Temistan” on the map) featured a central arcaded plaza and a towering idol. The houses had steeply sloped roofs, and the bridges surrounding the island bore the same arched design Bordone saw daily in the narrow streets of Venice.

This Tenochtitlán–Venice parallel wasn’t unique to Bordone. Other cartographers, including Giambattista Ramusio (1534) and Giulio Ballino (1569), also explicitly compared the two cities. Even Cortés’s tomb described Tenochtitlán as another Venice. In short, at least in the minds of the cartographers, the Venetians had reached America in their own way.