Nothing is known about the Venetian mapmaker Paolo Forlani except what is written on the maps he produced. His earliest dated work is signed 1560 and his latest 1571, giving a short period of activity in which almost 100 plates, two town books containing 40 views, and one globe were attributed to his hand. The imprint on most of these refers to Forlani as the engraver, while one cites him as the printer and another as a distributor; he seems to have had little involvement in the cartographical design or compilation of the maps he engraved, reproducing the work, or parts of the work, of other cartographers rather than executing his own.

Among those Forlani copied was Giacomo Gastaldi, on whose Ptolemaic maps he drew heavily. Two decades after its initial publication, he reproduced Gastaldi's 'Soria e Terra Sancta nova tabula', for a full description of which, please see item 23. With the exception of his engraving style, which is somewhat neater and more uniform than Gastaldi's, and the addition of a title cartouche over the Arabian Desert, Forlani's map is identical to the original.