ROME — The United States on Tuesday officially returned 25 artifacts looted over the decades from Italy, including Etruscan vases, first-century frescoes and precious books that ended up in U.S. museums, universities and private collections.
Italy has been on a campaign to recover looted artifacts, using the courts and public shaming to compel museums and collectors to return them, and has won back several important pieces.
The items Tuesday were either spontaneously turned over to U.S. authorities or seized by police after investigators noticed them in Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction catalogues, gallery listings, or as a result of customs searches, court cases or tips. One 17th-century Venetian cannon was seized by Border Patrol agents in Boston as it was being smuggled from Egypt to the U.S. inside construction equipment, police said.
The artifacts included Etruscan vases from the Toledo Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 17th-century botany books from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a manuscript from the 1500s stolen from the Turin archdiocese in 1990 that ended up listed in the University of South Florida’s special collections.
“Italy is blessed with a rich cultural legacy and therefore cursed to suffer the pillaging of important cultural artifacts,” U.S. Ambassador John Phillips said, adding that Interpol estimates the illicit trade in cultural heritage produces more than $9 billion in profits each year.