The United States has returned 600 stolen works of art to Italy. A “loot” from 60 million euros

Unique pieces, stolen over the years and resold to galleries and museums. The American ambassador: "Now watch out for Ukraine"

ROME – Bronze statues, gold coins, mosaics and manuscripts. About six hundred unique pieces, antiquities looted and then resold, are finally go home. The United States has returned to Italy a stolen artistic heritage worth 60 million euros.Stolen works, sold to dealers who often falsified or altered the documents of origin to resell the loot at a high level. Final buyers: auction houses and museums.

The return ceremony was attended by US Ambassador Jack Markell, Matthew Bogdanos, head of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the New York District Attorney’s Office, and members of the US Department of Homeland Security Investigations, along with leaders of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Carabinieri.

Markell said Washington DC was committed to returning the stolen loot “where it belongs” as a sign of respect for Italy and its cultural and artistic heritage. He also added that the United States now has an eye on the latest target of art traffickers: Ukraine.

Among the most valuable finds a 4th-century Naxian silver coin depicting the wine god Dionysius, looted from an illicit excavation site in Sicily before 2013 and smuggled into the UK. The coin, listed for sale for $500,000, was found in New York last year. The artifacts, which range from the 9th century B.C. to the 2nd century, they also include a life-size bronze figure, various bronze heads and Etruscan vases. Other objects, including oil paintings from the 16th and 19th centuries, were stolen from Italian museums, religious institutions and private homes. Other objects were returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and by some well-known philanthropists.

However, among the returned works there is not the ancient Greek bronze statue “Victorious Youth”, the subject of a ten-year legal battle between Italy and the Getty Museum in Malibu, California. The European Court of Human Rights recently supported Italy’s right to seize it, reaffirming that it had been illegally taken from our country.