My dissertation examines the creation and translation of illustrated manuscripts in early colonial central Mexico and their reception and reproduction in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The project’s fulcrum is the Codex Ríos (Codex Vaticanus A, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana), a pictorial encyclopedia of Nahua culture that was reproduced after a now-lost precontact “original” in the decades after the European invasion and sent to Rome. The Codex Ríos is the only surviving Mesoamerican manuscript to feature a comprehensive textual account of Nahua culture, history, and religion in Italian, and my dissertation is the first art-historical study to consider the production of a colonial Mexican manuscript by Indigenous painter-scribes (tlacuiloque) in the Valley of Mexico and its reproduction for a specifically Italian audience. Through codicological examinations, comparative visual analysis of Indigenous pictographies, paleographic studies of Italian, Spanish, and Nahuatl scripts, and technical analysis of paper and pigments, my research explores how illustrated, translated, and copied books acted as linguistic and cultural mediators between colonial Latin America and early modern Italy.