The New International Encyclopædia/Codazzi, Agostino

CODAZZI, kō̇-dät′sē̇, Agostino (1792-1859). An Italian traveler, engineer, and geographer, born at Lugo, near Ferrara. He entered the army as a volunteer, and afterwards set up as a merchant at Constantinople, whence he made extensive journeys through Europe. In 1817 he went to the United States. He served in the Venezuelan Revolutionary Army, and later entered the Colombian service, in which he rose in 1820 to be a lieutenant-colonel. From 1831 to 1838 he prepared maps of the State of Venezuela, being compelled, for the purpose of topographical surveys, to explore the deserts of Guiana, and to penetrate nearly to the sources of the Orinoco. The results of this undertaking he published in Paris in 1841, under the title Resumen de la geografía de Venezuela (with an atlas). He subsequently made surveys of the Isthmus of Panama, with reference to the possibility of an interoceanic ship-canal.