Christopher Columbus date back to 1932. But it was in the second half of the 1970s that research on Columbus absorbed a large part of his time. Taviani has left approximately 200 publications on Christopher Columbus (these have been translated English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Hungarian, Turkish, Vietnamese, etc.).). There are two major works: Christopher Columbus. The grand design (1974, ing. ed. 1985) and The voyages of Columbus (1984, ing. ed. 1991). Taviani wrote them by combining a study of primary and secondary sources with a direct geographic analysis of all the places Columbus reached. Taviani compared the various interpretations, pointed out those that were most reliable, provided some new insights and left the field open to further hypotheses whenever it was not possible to overcome any reasonable doubt. He dialogued with scholars from Italy and abroad and managed to achieve a nearly unanimous consensus on a few firm points of historiography. From the second half of the 1980s Taviani was president of the Scientific Committee for the "Nuova Raccolta Colombiana" (22 works by the most important scholars from Italy and abroad) and he also took part in organising celebrations marking the 500th Anniversary of the Columbus’ discoveries in 1992. His definitive work on the subject appeared in 1996 which summarised and updated all the previous works: Christopher Columbus (three volumes published by the Italian Geographic Society). Private life Taviani moved to Rome after the war and lived there for the rest of his life. For purposes of study, institutional postings or simply out of passion, from his youth Taviani made countless trips, visiting every continent, especially the countries of Latin America. Still he always retained close ties to his native Liguria. Every year he spent long periods near Bávari (a suburb of Genoa) in his parents’ modest country house. He was especially fond of the small mountain villages in the upper Val Trebbia where he had seen the Resistance grow against the Nazis and Fascists. In January 1941 Taviani married Vittoria Festa whom he had met at the University of Genoa: after more than sixty years of marriage they had eight children and twenty grandchildren. Death Taviani appeared for the last time on the Italian political stage on 30 May 2001, when he presided as senior member of the Senate’s inaugural session. A few days later he suffered a stroke and died in Rome in the early morning of