The Italian police on Tuesday returned to a Library of Venice (North) an incunable of great historical value, printed in 1493 and stolen decades ago, in which Christopher Columbus “communicates the discovery of the New World” to the Catholic Monarchs after their return from America.
This is a letter of 8 pages written in Latin, called ‘Indiae insulis exceeds Gangem Nuper Inventis’ (in the recently discovered islands of India beyond the Ganges), the Carabineros, the Italian militarized police, reported.
In the letter, Columbus recounts his finding to Queen Elizabeth and Fernando -financers of her expedition- on the same day of her arrival in Lisbon after returning from her long trip.
The document, “a precious and rare incunable, printed in Rome by Stephan Plannk after April 29, 1493”, belonged to the Martian National Library of Venice, “had been stolen before 1988” and finally this Tuesday was returned to the center in an official act.
“The letter immediately had considerable editorial success,” which coincided with the beginnings of the printing press and with the activities of the Bavarian printer Stephan Panck, “active in the Roman publishing world at the end of the 15th century.”
This printer that resided in the eternal city “produced in the last twenty years of the century more than 400 printed editions, and the Latin edition of the Charter de Colón enters this category.”
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An incunable stolen in which Columbus communicates his discovery of the New World returns to Venice
According to the Carabineros, the valuable document was found after investigations that revealed that some Columbus incunables “had reached the US market”, where they were tracked “due to the alleged presence of falsifications and other volumes evidently stolen from Italian and European libraries.”
The inquiries were carried out by the antiques section of the Carabineros, until it leads to the repatriation to Italy of the document.
In recent years, the incunable was in the hands of a rich collector of Dallas (EU), who had acquired the document legitimately and that he did not oppose his return after knowing that the epistle was illegally stolen.
The identification of the work was made with the support of an expert from the old books section of the Princeton University Library, who collaborated with the US Police “reporting the location of the letter”, when working in the scientific study to recognize that it was the stolen work.
According to the Carabineros, the investigations started in 2012, after a complaint of the theft of several old volumes presented by the Central National Library of Rome, and included a copy of this famous Charter of Columbus.
In 2016, research in the US allowed to recover another copy of the stolen Columbus letter from the Riccardian library of Florence.
Within the framework of these investigations, the US National Security Research Service (HSI) recovered several more copies of the Epistle of Columbus stolen from the Catalonia Library in Barcelona and the apostolic library of the Vatican.
With EFE information.
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