Lost in Paradise

“HEAVEN,” David Byrne sang, “is a place where nothing ever happens.” But if Alessandro Scafi’s “Mapping Paradise” (University of Chicago Press: 398 pp., $55) is any indication, heaven may also be a place on Earth. Indeed, “Mapping Paradise” aspires to be nothing less than a history of earthly paradise, starting with the early Christian era and continuing to the present day. Extensively illustrated, it is an atlas of the imagination, a guide to a landscape that remains just the slightest bit out of reach.

In much of the modern world, paradise is a matter of magical thinking, or (at best) an advertising come-on. Yet throughout human history, paradise has attracted philosophers, pilgrims and believers as both a physical and a spiritual ideal.

Some of the most interesting material here records efforts to find the site of the Garden of Eden, which many believe existed in Mesopotamia. In 1871, the Scottish explorer David Livingstone thought he might uncover Eden if he could find the source of the Nile; 34 years later, mapmaker A.P. Curtis posited the Land of Eden, a submerged continent between Africa and Australia. These days, the author notes with no discernible irony, “[t]he Internet seems ... to be fast becoming the home of the current mapping of the location of paradise.”

Scafi, a lecturer at the University of Bologna, writes with a scholar’s thoroughness. “Mapping Paradise” is thick with footnotes; at times, the prose can get a little dense. It’s all redeemed by the illustrations, 21 of them in color, that appear on nearly every page. Juxtaposing medieval illuminated manuscripts with satellite imagery and cartographic treasures -- one map of the world, drawn in 1086, uses portraits of the Apostles to signify the territories they evangelized -- “Mapping Paradise” is, in the end, a record not of place but of desire. Or, as Scafi puts it: “Whether the approach is openly religious or not, mankind still longs for a paradise on earth.”