ROME, (Reuters) – The United States has returned to Italy a rare copy of a letter Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493 describing his discovery of the Americas, after the document was stolen more than 25 years ago and replaced with a forgery.
Police said the genuine copy, worth 1 million euros ($1.13 million), had been stolen from a library in Florence and replaced with a phoney reproduction. The stolen document eventually ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington.
Columbus, an Italian explorer whose voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 relied on the then-unproven theory that the world was round, wrote the original letter to his financial backers, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
In it, he describes the people, flora and fauna in the new landscape and how he – thinking he had reached India – took possession of the islands he came across after 33 days at sea.
The original letter was written in Spanish and soon translated into Latin and printed in Rome. The stolen document in question was an original printed copy of that translation.
U.S. ambassador to Italy John Phillips said several original prints of the translation still exist, but the investigation revealed that some had been stolen from libraries in Europe and replaced with high-quality forgeries.
The forgery in Florence was discovered after an Italian police unit fighting illegal trafficking of artworks started investigating the theft of books from a library in Rome.
