A treasure trove of stolen art, ancient ceramics and marble work hunted down by Italian police went on public display yesterday in a sumptuous exhibition in the presidential palace in Rome.

The collection of artefacts, all retrieved in the past few years, includes oil paintings, gilt altarpieces, ancient vases and a series of ornately carved marble funerary urns considered to be one of the most important ever finds in Etruscan art.

The exhibition shines a light on the scale of illegal trade in art and ancient artefacts in Italy, which boasts the world’s largest number of Unesco world heritage sites but struggles to protect its vast patrimony from theft and mismanagement.

“The works on display, from illegal excavations or thefts from museums and churches, each has a specific story,” said Louis Godart, an archaeologist and artistic adviser to Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano.

The special police unit involved, the ‘Carabinieri Art Squad’, has recovered almost a million ancient artefacts and hundreds of thousands of artworks, including some by Renaissance artists Raphael and Perugino, since its formation 45 years ago. The squad has displayed some of their previous trawls but the exhibition at the Quirinal Palace, Napolitano’s official residence, is the largest to date and comprises more than 100 works spanning 2,000 years of Italian history.

The largest items on display in the exhibition and filling a whole room of the palace are the Etruscan funerary urns, which are carved with scenes of centaurs, battles and ancient myths.

Dating from the third to the first century B.C., the urns were part of the mausoleum of the aristocratic Cacni family, thought to be disturbed by builders during modern construction work near the city of Perugia.

The discovery of a small marble head and a photograph of an Etruscan urn allowed police to bust an illegal trafficking operation. The traffickers had used the photo and bust to tempt potential buyers, in violation of an Italian law that ancient artefacts belong to the state and must be declared.

Now professionally restored, vivid original paintwork in blue, black and terracotta is visible on the marbles.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.