VIENNA (Reuters) -
An 800-year-old map, the sole surviving copy of a chart used by the Roman Empire's courier service, was put on show for just one day on Monday after being accorded "Memory of the World" status by UNESCO.
The parchment scroll, nearly 7 metres (yards) long, could only be displayed briefly because too much light would damage it, before it was returned to storage at Austria's National Library, where it has been since 1738.
From north to south, the map covers the British Isles to north Africa. But because the scroll is just over 30 cms (12inches) high, the north-south axis is greatly compressed, depicting the Mediterranean Sea as a small stretch of blue squeezed between today's Croatia and Italy.
"It's a bit like when you look at a map of the Vienna underground system -- it's not accurate but it gives you a good idea of how to get around," Andreas Fingernagel of the National Library told journalists at the showing.
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