US Returns Columbus Letter on New World Discovery to Italy

The U.S. government has returned a Latin copy of a letter by Christopher Columbus, believed to have been stolen from a library in Venice, Italy, in the 1980s, to Italy, CNN reported on the 20th (local time).

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under the Department of Homeland Security, recently handed over the copy of Columbus's letter to Italy.

Columbus wrote the letter in Spanish in 1493, the year after he discovered the Americas, to inform his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Later, the letter was produced in a Latin version and distributed to European royal courts. The returned letter is this Latin version, specifically one of the two editions printed by the famous 15th-century printer Stephan Plannck, known as the 'Frank 1 edition.'

The letter copy is believed to have been stolen from the National Marciana Library in Venice, Italy, in the 1980s. It is unclear how the letter came to the United States, but in 2020, ICE and the Delaware State Prosecutor's Office publicly disclosed the existence of the letter.

Portrait of Columbus. [Photo by Wikipedia]

According to ICE and others, a private collector in the U.S. purchased it from a book dealer in 2003 without knowing it was stolen property.

At the time, ICE estimated the letter's value to exceed $1.3 million (approximately 1.67 billion KRW).

This is the fourth time the U.S. government has returned a Columbus letter. Columbus's letters have been stolen from various locations in Italy and have flowed into the U.S. and other countries, and the U.S. has been returning these letters to Italy one after another.

The U.S. government delivered a copy of the letter to the Vatican in 2018 and had previously returned a copy to the Italian government in 2016.

CNN commented that this return of Columbus's letter is part of the U.S. government's extensive efforts to repatriate stolen goods to their countries of origin.

Since 2007, ICE has returned about 20,000 items to more than 40 countries and institutions.

The returned items include art looted by the Nazis, Egyptian sarcophagi, French paintings, Italian sculptures, Mongolian and Chinese dinosaur fossils, and even human remains.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.