The United States returned seven stolen and looted artefacts to Italy, including a rare Renaissance oil-on-copper painting and three pages ripped out of antique choir books.
Homeland Security Janet Napolitano formally signed over the items − which also included a pair of 2,000-year-old ceramic vessels and a small Roman sculpture − during a midday ceremony at the Italian Embassy.
“These beautiful objects belong to you, the people of Italy,” said Ms Napolitano, while Italian Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero hailed the objects’ return as “a major event and a joint success”.
Since 2007, the United States has recovered more than 2,000 artefacts from 23 countries as part of an ongoing international effort to combat a global trade in looted, stolen and illegally exported works of art.
“This is a major return. This is one of the more significant ones that we’ve done,” said John Morton, director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
The handover was the outcome of four separate US investigations that began with tip-offs from Italy’s paramilitary Carabinieri police, which combed through websites and auction catalogues to pinpoint missing artifacts.
Two of the investigations − involving the two ceramic vessels and the small white Roman marble statue − have been linked to Gianfranco Becchina, an Italian national allegedly associated with Italian organised crime, ICE said in a statement.
General B. Pasquale Muggeo, commander of the Carabinieri’s cultural heritage unit, said through another Carabinieri officer that Becchina was being prosecuted. He did not elaborate.
The two ceramic vessels − an Attic red-figured pelike and a red-figured situla − had been looted from Italian archeological sites, and the statue − a Janiform herm, or two-faced sculpture of a head − illegally excavated.
Those three items had been smuggled out of Italy via Switzerland, eventually finding their way to Christie’s auctioneers in New York, which Morton said cooperated with authorities to ensure their return. Leilo Orsi’s Renaissance painting Leda e il Cigno (Leda and The Swan), a rare example of oil on copper, was imported with false documentation in 2006 and sold for €1.2 million at Sotheby’s auctioneers in New York.
“The buyer rescinded the purchase after learning of the Italian criminal investigation,” ICE said.
The fourth investigation led to the surrender of two choir book pages stolen from a monastery in Sienna in 1975 and a church in Pistoria in 1990 by a rare-book dealer in Portland, Oregon.
The same dealer also gave up a third choir book page that had been the subject of an earlier investigation, but never recovered.
Earlier this month, US Customs and Border Protection agents in Miami returned a 16th century Italian masterpiece painting stolen from a Jewish family in France during the Nazi occupation in World War II to descendants of the owners.