Statue of Flavio Gioia

Flavio Gioja or Gioia (c. 1300) is reputed to have been an Italian mariner and inventor, although modern scholarship disputes that he ever, in fact, existed. He was supposedly a marine pilot and has traditionally been credited with perfecting the sailor's compass by suspending its needle over a fleur-de-lis design, which pointed north. He also enclosed the needle in a little box with a glass cover. The sailor's compass, however, had been in use long before by Mediterranean navigators. (Gioia was said to have introduced the fleur-de-lis design in deference to Charles of Anjou, the French king of Naples.)