Although his name almost immediately passed into oblivion, the cosmographic studies of Fra Mauro (active ca. 1430-ca. 1459/1464) survived in the work of subsequent Venetian scholars and mapmakers. At the beginning of the 16^th century Alessandro Zorzi (15^th-16^th cent.) composed a notebook of letters, descriptions, and maps that illustrated the known world from Asia to the New World.

Among the collected documents, we find four itineraries that track the journey from Jerusalem and Alexandria to Ethiopia, describing the Nile and its sources based on a text in Venetian vernacular attributed to a certain “friar Nicola” of the monastery of San Michele in Murano. The text clearly derives from Fra Mauro’s world map, or possibly his preparatory notes, and is the earliest documented case of the use of his cosmographic research.

The Cretan mapmaker Giorgio Sideri (16^th cent.), known as Callapoda, also made use of Fra Mauro’s work. In 1541, when he was at the service of the Serenissima, Sideri designed a nautical chart of the Mediterranean for the Supervisor of the Galleys Francesco Zeno the Older (16^th cent.), which reproduces much of the information in Fra Mauro’s marine chart now preserved at the Vatican Library.

We can also surmise that Fra Mauro was a precious source for the mapmaker from Ancona, Grazioso Benincasa (ca. 1400-ca. 1482), who was also active in Venice and may have been, in turn, a source for his fellow Anconitan, Angelo Freducci (active ca. 1547-1556), who in 1556 published a nautical atlas that shows clear signs of deriving from Fra Mauro’s maps. Some maps in Freducci’s atlas appear to be based on the Vatican Library marine chart, in particular the maps of the the Caspian Sea and the Red Sea. The two final maps of the regions of Asia, on the other hand, are almost certainly derived from Fra Mauro’s world map.