Italy creates museum for trafficked ancient artifacts

Italy has been so successful in recovering ancient artworks and artifacts that were illegally exported from the country it has created a museum for them.

The Museum of Rescued Art was inaugurated on June 15 in a cavernous structure that is part of Rome's ancient Baths of Diocletian. The Octagonal Hall exhibition space was designed to showcase Italy's efforts, through patient diplomacy and court challenges, to get valuable antiquities repatriated, often after decades in foreign museums or private collections.

Exhibits in the new museum will change every few months as the objects on display return to what experts consider their territory of origin, many of them places that were part of ancient Etruscan or Magna Grecia civilizations in central or southern Italy.

The inaugural exhibit revolves around some 100 of 260 artifacts recovered by the nation's paramilitary Carabinieri art squad from the United States and brought back to Italy in December 2021.

The pieces on display, which were found during clandestine digs and illegally exported, include exquisitely carved Etruscan figurines and imposing painted jars from several centuries B.C. The items previously were held by museums, auction houses and private collections.

The new Rome museum is exhibiting objects "never before seen in Italy," said Massimo Osanna, director general of Italy's state museums. In his previous role, Osanna had long been in charge of reviving the fortunes of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city near Naples, one of the world's most famed archaeological cites that itself was heavily looted by antiquities thieves of past generations.

The recently recovered antiquities are from before the Roman era, dating back to the 8th to 4th centuries B.C. Many of them came...

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