The United States has returned to Italy a rare copy of a letter Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493 describing his discovery of the Americas, after the document was stolen more than 25 years ago and replaced with a forgery.
Police said the genuine copy, worth €1 million ($1.13 million), had been stolen from a library in Florence and replaced with a phoney reproduction. The stolen document eventually ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington.
Columbus, an Italian explorer whose voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 relied on the then-unproven theory that the world was round, wrote the original letter to his financial backers, Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.