2023-07-20 20:03:55
From the time he left Puerto de Palos de la Frontera in Huelva on August 3, 1492 until he returned to Spain a year later, Christopher Columbus applied himself to writing a travel diary to recount his arrival in America for the first time. This narration, in which the navigator was convinced that he had arrived in the East Indies, was reflected in a letter that has now returned to Italy after being stolen decades ago in Venice and recently recovered in Texas (United States).
Not in vain Columbus had suffered the unspeakable to obtain financing for his expedition and decided to record the vicissitudes experienced until he made landfall in the New World thousands of kilometers from the Iberian Peninsula and during his return. He did it in the letter Of the islands lately discovered in the Indian sea (‘Of the recently discovered islands of India on the Ganges’).
The incunabula, without original date but with thirty copies printed in Rome in 1493 by the German typographer Stephan Planck, consists of eight pages of historical-bibliographical importance immeasurable. Only sixteen copies of the document are preserved worldwide, the majority in Spain and Italy, where several have been stolen, later located in the United States.
These types of documents arouse genuine interest in American collectors and the epistle ended up precisely in Dallas after its theft at the end of the 1980s from the National Marciana Library in Veniceto which it will be returned, as reported by the Italian Government.
After the theft, the letter ended up in the hands of a Texas-based collector, who acquired it in good faith at auction for a value of one million euros and has not opposed the confiscation ordered by the Philadelphia Prosecutor’s Office after knowing the illegal origin.
Now that the epistle has returned to Italy, the Government intends not only to return it to the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, but to inaugurate around it an exhibition on its content with the aim of bringing tourists and citizens closer to the figure of Columbus, as reported by the Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano.
Of in 2016 Italy recovered another letter that had been stolen from the Riccardiana Library in Florence. Four years before, the Department of Justice of the United States received the information that this incunabula was in the Congress of Washington. In this case, authorities believe that the trace of the document was lost in the 1950s and recovered in 1988, to be sold at auction at Christies in 1992.
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