Re: Who first noticed Italy was a boot?

Mariner's maps generally didnt put coastlines on square grids
until the 16th century. They kind of following coastlines in a
relative, relational sense. Locally the coastlines look right,
but the overall picture is not what global cartographers use today.

Aside from that, once the Mediterranean was realized to be a closed
oval sea, people would have drawn coaslines that way.
Although boat crossings may have started 20-30 thousand years ago,
The Phoenicians where probably trading and colonizing more or less the
entire
coastline by the early first millennium B.C. And the Greeks a couple
centuries after
that. Both would have notice the Italian shape. Plus the Italians
only lived halfway
down Italy until third century Roman conquests. The south was Greek
and
Carthagian (Phoenician).

.