«Secundo afferman marinari Genuesi...». Marinai e navigatori genovesi in un falso novecentesco

Secundo afferman marinari Genuesi...». Genoese Sailors and Navigators in a Twentieth Century Forgery In the 1930s, an obscure emigrant from Campania, Emanuele Filomeno Marciano Rossi, presented a collection of maps and texts to the Library of Congress of Washington, with the declared intention of shedding light on the authenticity of a family inheritance. Actually, it was a forgery, which after several decades of oblivion was published in 2014. The collection known today consists of twelve pieces, maps and texts, one of which is held by the Library of Congress itself; it redraws the history of America’s discovery backdating it, and at the same time celebrating Christopher Columbus’ first arrival the New World by the Atlantic route. One of the common threads in the documents is the presence of members of famous families, particularly Venetian (Polo) and Genoese (Spinola and Doria). In this respect the documents constitute a reflection, albeit on a distortng mirror, of the fame of the Genoese as rulers of the seas, and of their indispensable role in the authentication of a corpus of geographical documents. This article aims to present these documents, in particular the ‘Genoese’ texts.