Italy celebrated the return of 266 antiquities from the United States on Friday, including Etruscan vases and ancient Roman coins and mosaics worth tens of millions of Euros, that were looted and sold to US museums and private collectors.
The returned items include artefacts recently seized in New York from a storage unit belonging to a British antiquities dealer, officials said. In addition, the haul that arrived in Rome included 65 objects that had been offered by a collector to Houston’s Menil Collection but were declined.
The art unit of Italy’s Carabinieri paramilitary police said the owner of the collection “spontaneously” gave back the items after investigators determined they had come from clandestine excavations of archaeological sites, according to a Carabinieri statement.
While the source said the works had been part of the Menil Collection, the museum said they never were. The museum said a collector approached the museum in 2022 about making a gift of the artefacts, but the museum curator directed the collector to the Italian culture minister, “who alerted the museum that Italy was claiming the objects.”
"The Menil Collection declined these works from the collector and they have never been part of the museum's collection," spokesperson Tommy Napier said in a statement late Friday to the media.
Italy has been on a decades-long campaign to hunt down antiquities that were looted by “tombaroli,” or tomb raiders, and then sold to private collectors and museums in the US and beyond. The looting operations involved art dealers who sold the items directly or via auctions.
Some of the items were handed over to Italian authorities Tuesday at the offices of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Bragg’s office said they included an Apulian krater, or vase, dating from 335 BC that was seized in July from a private collection in New York.
Other items included two Etruscan tile paintings from Cerveteri, a frequently-looted necropolis site northwest of Rome, that date back to 440 BC. According to Bragg’s office, the tiles were looted in the 1980s. The Italian police art squad said the value of all 266 pieces, on the open market, would come to tens of millions of euros.