By: Yimo Liu

A letter written by Christopher Columbus 15 centuries ago was finally returned to the Venice library.

Columbus wrote the letter from the New World after he discovered it. He sent it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in Spain. The letter included what the land was like and what the natural resources were like. However, before the letter could reach King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, it needed to get printed by a man named Stephan Plannck.

Plannck printed the letter, but he accidentally missed Queen Isabella’s name on the letter. He printed the letter again a few days later and now, the two different letters are called Plannck I (one) and Plannck II (two).

The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice acquired the Plannck I sometime in or around 1875, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It says the document was stolen at an unknown time between 1985 and 1988.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) received information in 2011 about alleged forgeries of several Latin editions of the Columbus letter, according to ICE. Because of this, they located three stolen Plannck II’s. They returned one to Florence in 2016, and the other two to Barcelona and Vatican City in 2018.

In June 2018, HSI Wilmington and HSI Rome asked the book expert they had been working with named Paul Needham, a former librarian at Princeton University, to compile a full list of all known Columbus letters in Italy. Soon, the team discovered that a copy of the Plannck I had been stolen from the Venice library. “Based on the findings of the rare book expert and additional analysis conducted by staff from the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute, it was determined that the Plannck I Columbus letter stolen from the Marciana National Library was likely the same Columbus letter in the collection of a privately owned library located in the United States,” ICE said.

HSI worked with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, so that they could collect the Plannck I and return it to Venice library. Mark Olexa, an HSI special agent who has led the Columbus letter investigation letter for the past decade, said in a Twitter video that “we are really excited to be returning it to its rightful place with the government in Italy.”