Today is Columbus Day, but lucky souls will celebrate it tomorrow, since observing a holiday on Sunday in Utah hardly does anybody any good. This venerable occasion has fallen on hard times since 1919, when Italian Vice-Consul Fortunato Anselmo got the legislature to establish Oct. 12 as an official salute to Cristoforo Columbo of Genoa and all Utahns of Italian heritage.

Utah's Italian-American community is thriving, but the man once celebrated as the discoverer of the New World is now denounced as a greedy slave-trading murderer. But as Oxford University historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto notes, "the real Columbus was a mixture of virtues and vices like the rest of us."

If anything is certain about Columbus -- or even history in general -- it must be summed up in the old rhyme recited by generations of schoolchildren to teach them the year Europeans (excluding Vikings) discovered America: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Now even that is open to question.

According to the London Times, historian Ruggero Marino claims Columbus' 1492 voyage for Spain simply repeated a discovery made about 1485 while the Genoese navigator was working for Pope Innocent VIII.

Marino points to an inscription on the pope's tomb -- Novi orbis suo aevo inventi gloria -- attributing the glory of the discovery of the New World to Innocent's pontificate. Trouble is, Innocent died in July 1492, before Columbus weighed anchor Aug. 3. "The inscription either anticipates Columbus's success," Marino observes, "or else refers to an earlier journey."

This might be a simple case of giving credit where credit isn't due, but the late Islamic scholar Alessandro Bausani found a more intriguing clue on the Piri Reis map, drawn on gazelle skin in 1513 by Admiral Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed of the Ottoman Empire.

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