Cultural Restitution
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Italy
Updated July 2023
Below is a schedule of successful restitutions made to or from Italy, together with other restitution news.
Entries are updated regularly
July 2023
Italy seeks the return of seven antiquities from the Louvre, some of which may be connected to convicted art traffickers Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina
June 2023
A 2,800-year-old Babylonian stone tablet, inscribed with cuneiform text and handed over by Italy to Iraq's President in June, has gone on display in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad
May 2023
Italy is coming to terms with Fascist-era colonial artefacts by conducting a 'census' of what's in the collections of Italy's 498 state museums
February 2022
A Buddha statue stolen from the Devisthan Kundalpur Temple in Bihar has been surrendered by an Italian collector to the Consulate General of India in Milan
January 2022
Archaeological Museum in Palermo, Sicily has agreed to return a fragment from the Parthenon to the Acropolis Museum, Athens as part of a four-year loan arrangement
August 2021
Has Italy's Carabinieri TPC extended their remit by attempting to retrieve objects allegedly illegally exported decades earlier?
May 2021
Italian authorities say they've recovered over 500,000 stolen or counterfeit works of art in 2020
December 2020
Plans to open Mussolini's colonial museum, in storage for over half a century and comprising a collection of 12,000 items, has alarmed post-colonial researchers
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/amid-reckoning-on-race-italy-exhumes-colonial-history
February 2020
A Nazi-looted Renaissance sculpture by Andrea della Robbia, acquired by Hermann Goring in 1941, is returned by Italy to German Culture Minister Monika Grutters
March 2019
Italian Culture Ministry agrees to oversee return of 800 illegally exported cultural artefacts to the People's Republic of China
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/china-italy-repatriation-1497034
December 2017
A shrunken warrior head, presented to the Vatican by a missionary in 1925, is returned to the Pumapungo ethnographic museum in Cuenca, Ecuador
https://www.thelocal.it/20171217/vatican-returns-shrunken-warrior-head-to-ecuador
February 2017
Two 2nd or 3rd cent A.D. sculpted busts, damaged by insurgents at Palmyra, are returned to the National Museum of Damascus following restoration in Italy
https://www.iccrom.org/press-release/palmyra-sculptures-restored-italy-now-returned-syria
April 2007
Italian court rules the 'Venus of Cyrene', looted in 1912, was not part of Italy's cultural heritage and should be returned to Libya
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-libya-venus-idUSL2350261120070423
April 2005
First piece of ancient Axum obelisk, an important national symbol in Ethiopia and looted in 1937 on the orders of Benito Mussolini, is returned by Italy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/20/italy.ethiopia
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