The Dead Sea Scrolls will come to Italy for the first time in a Rome exhibition next year, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) confirmed on Thursday.
IAA spokesman Yoli Schwartz said Israel made the offer to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday as he visited the laboratories where the 2,000-year-old Biblical scrolls are currently undergoing restoration with the help of Italian experts.
''We are sure that the scrolls will arouse great interest in the Italian public,'' Schwartz said, adding that Napolitano had pledged to be ''the first visitor'' to the show.
Italy's Central Institute for Restoration and its Institute for Book Pathology are involved in a two-year project to restore the famous scrolls, which have been slowly deteriorating since their discovery 60 years ago.
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of roughly 800 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves at Qumran in the West Bank.
The texts, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, are of great religious and historical significance as they include practically the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 AD.
They preserve evidence of considerable diversity of belief and practice within Judaism at the time of Jesus.
Many of the scrolls are now housed in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.
Napolitano is on a state visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
