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US returns $80 million worth of stolen artifacts to Italy

2024-05-30 13:49:35Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

US returns $80 million worth of stolen artifacts to Italy

Some 600 works of art went on display at the offices of the Central Institute for Restoration, housed inside a former women's prison in central Rome, this week. Ranging from life-size bronze statues to small Roman coins, from oil paintings to mosaic floors, the pieces span the 9th century BC to the 2nd century AD and represent stolen and trafficked art of only one year confiscated by the team of the Manhattan prosecutor, Col. Matthew Bogdanos which then returned to Italy.

The trafficked works, looted from the Italian regions of Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, were seized in New York and New Jersey last year. The returned works, along with 60 items repatriated last year, are worth more than $80 million (or roughly €73.6 million) – but are only a drop in the water when it comes to artworks still hidden in private warehouses and exhibited in museums in the United States. Bogdanos said the $80 million worth of items does not include another 100 items his team has just seized in the US.

What makes it so difficult to seize and return stolen artifacts is that authorities often have no idea what they're looking for, according to General D. Francesco Gargaro, commander of the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage. This means that, in addition to the objects themselves, their historical context was also stolen, robbing archaeologists of valuable information.

Most of the recent items returned to Italy were excavated from clandestine excavations or stolen from churches, museums and private individuals, Gargaro said. Among the items on display Tuesday was a cuirass and two bronze heads dating to the 4th-3rd century BC, which were confiscated from a New York gallery owner. There was also a bronze statue of Umbrian depicting a warrior stolen from an Italian museum in 1962 that was found in a prominent American museum.

And a mosaic floor depicting the myth of Orpheus charming wild animals with the sounds of the lyre from the mid-3rd to mid-4th century AD was found after it was stolen from a clandestine dig in Sicily in early 1990s. It was confiscated from the private collection of a well-known New York collector. Italy's Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit uses artificial intelligence to search for stolen cultural assets under a new program called the Stolen Works of Art Detection System (SWOADS), which searches for items taken by scan the web and social media for images. In 2023 alone, 105,474 works of art worth more than 264 million euros (or $287 million) were found and confiscated worldwide thanks to the artificial intelligence project, according to Gargaro.


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