Vaticanist Orazio La Rocca has written a book ("Traveling with the Pietà", San Paolo Edizioni) that compellingly recounts the incredible but also criticized journey of Michelangelo's Pieta from St. Peter's Basilica to New York for the 1964 World's Fair. It all begins on April 4, the day when the sculpture, for the first and only time, leaves the Vatican and is loaded onto a truck for Naples, where it will arrive after about twelve hours of travel in low gear. Waiting for the precious cargo along the quay of the port is the ship Cristoforo Colombo, on whose deck the crate with the Pieta will be placed under the open sky and secured in such a way that it can withstand any stress and watched in full view throughout the crossing. After about eight days of sailing, the arrival in New York, where the Pietà is placed in the Holy See Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair, which until the following October will be visited by more than 27 million people literally fascinated by Michelangelo's work. Through the voices of yesterday's and today's witnesses, Orazio La Rocca makes us relive, with a certain trepidation, the preparations for the journey, the daring transatlantic crossing, the media clamor aroused by the initiative, the nostalgia for the absence from St. Peter's of that beloved sculpture and finally, after nineteen months, its happy return to the Vatican.