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 "We are returning it to its rightful owner," said U.S.
ambassador to the Vatican, Callista Gingrich, at a handover
ceremony in a frescoed room of the Vatican Library, which houses
tens of thousands of rare, historic items.
While still at sea returning to Europe in February, 1493 - four
months after discovering the New World - Columbus penned a
letter to Spain's monarchs describing what he had found and
laying the groundwork for his request to fund another voyage.
His original letter was written in Spanish. A Latin translation
was manually printed in several copies and they became the main
vehicle for spreading news of his find to the royal courts of
Europe and the papacy.
One of the Latin letters, printed in Rome by Stephan Plannack in
1493, found its way into the Vatican Library. Known as the
Columbus Letter, it is made up of eight pages, each about 18.5
cm by 12 cm.
But in 2011, an American expert in rare manuscripts received a
Columbus letter for authentication and deemed it to be original.
The year before, the same expert had studied a Columbus Letter
in the Vatican Library and suspected that it was a fake because,
among other factors, its stitching marks did not match up with
those on the binding.
The letter in the United States, however, matched up perfectly
to the binding marks of the leather cover of the letter he had
studied in the Vatican.
The expert, who was not identified, notified Homeland Security
art investigators, who began working quietly with Vatican
inspectors and rare books experts.
They concluded that at some time after the authentic eight-page
letter became part of the Vatican Library, someone took it out
of its binding and replaced it with a forgery so good that
no-one noticed.
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"We do not know exactly when the substitution took place. We will
probably never know who the forger was," said Archbishop Jean-Louis
Brugues, the Vatican's chief archivist and librarian.
Homeland Security agents, who were present at Thursday's handover,
and their Vatican counterparts, coordinated the examination of the
letters by other experts, including some at Princeton University.
Their investigations determined that the authentic Columbus letter
had been sold to a New York book dealer by Marino Massimo De Caro,
who Homeland Security defined as a "notorious Italian book thief".
He is currently serving a seven-year sentence in Italy for the theft
of some 4,000 ancient books and manuscripts from Italian libraries
and private collections.
The authentic letter was purchased in 2004 by the late American
collector David Parsons for $875,000. After the investigations, his
widow agreed to voluntarily return the letter to the Vatican
Library.
The letter is now worth about $1.2 million, officials at the
handover ceremony said.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella. Editing by Patrick Johnston)
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