$10m worth of antiques trafficked in the US return to Italy

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
17 Jun 2022 20:57
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Italy has opened a new museum in Rome dedicated to displaying more than 200 objects thought to have been stolen from cultural sites around the nation and trafficked in the United States.

$10m worth of antiques trafficked in the US return to Italy

Italy has opened a new museum in Rome dedicated to displaying more than 200 objects thought to have been stolen from cultural sites around the nation and trafficked in the US.

211 of the 260 pieces in the new museum's rotating collection were found during seizures led by the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which estimates the value of the recovered artifacts to be about $10 million.

Eight of the artefacts retrieved (NYT)

The Museum of Rescued Art also houses the ancient city's 306 C.E. Baths of Diocletian. The 260 items from Etruria, Greece, and Rome, which are currently being returned to the Italian government in batches, have gone on display as part of the new enterprise's debut show. Some of the items came from private collections, museums, and auction houses.

Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, Carabinieri commander Teo Luzi, and Massimo Osanna, director of Italy's state museums, officially opened the museum's Octagonal Hall display space on Wednesday. Franceschini described the artifacts populating the new area as having "intangible value" tied to Italy's "historical memory" during a news conference. He said that several of them had never been seen in public before.

Votive terracotta heads from the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C.E. and a red-figure Apulian vase representing Eros from the mid-4th century B.C.E. are among the more costly pieces on show. Other items on display include sculptures, urns, plates, and coins ranging from the eighth to fourth century B.C. Many of them come from places in Western-Central Italy that have Etruscan historical sites. Experts are still unsure of the dates when they were initially plundered.

Manhattan District Attorney

The Carbineri has been involved in efforts to repatriate art. Since its inception in 1969, the team in charge of dealing with antiquities looting claims to have recovered an estimated 3 million cultural objects.

However, in several high-profile incidents, the Italian police force has been challenged by US organizations. In 2018, an Italian court ordered the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return the bronze statue of a naked male known as "Victorious Youth". The museum disputed the judicial verdict on the grounds that the relic was first discovered on foreign seas.

$10m worth of antiques trafficked in the US return to Italy

Michael McCullough, a New York-based lawyer who focuses on art restitution cases, told ARTnews that “It doesn’t always make sense to exhibit objects in a manner that highlights their removal from and return to the country,” adding that doing so may fail to attract long-term audiences.

He claimed that "not all antiquities removed from Italy were high-quality objects worth looking at.”

Other governments have undertaken similar programs centered on returned antiquities, campaigning for the repatriation of other items from museums overseas in the process. Greece established an Athens museum dedicated to displaying its Parthenon marbles in 2009, emphasizing the absence of others taken in the nineteenth century. This year, Nigeria announced intentions to create an institution in Benin City to house Benin bronzes seized during a military raid in 1897 and currently stored in European and American museums.