Italy recovers two valuable stolen goods in the US: a Roman mosaic and a letter from St. John Bosco

During a ceremony at the headquarters of the U.S. Embassy in Rome,Ambassador Lewis M. Eisenberg returned to Italy two cultural assets belonging to Italian heritage that had been identified through investigations by the Carabinieri TPC Command and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It is the Letter of St. John Bosco to Duchess Agnese Boncompagni Ludovisi, dated July 30, 1867, consisting of 3 pages: on July 13, 2016, Prince Boncompagni Ludovisi Nicolò, legitimate descendant of the lineage of the Princes of Piombino, reported the theft of the important historical document that took place between 1940 and 2016 from the private Boncompagni Ludovisi archive in Rome.

Also recovered was a polychrome mosaic dating back to the 1st-2nd century A.D. depicting the face of a satyr: On Dec. 16, 2015, UNESCO in Paris sent a missive to the Permanent Representation of Italy to that International Organization, in which it extended to our country as well the request for cooperation, made by the U.S. Authorities, regarding some archaeological goods, recovered in the U.S., whose provenance was unknown. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, delegated for the verification of the case by the U.S. side, had included these finds in a database, which could be consulted online by the States concerned. Comparison with the works listed in the Database of Illicitly Misappropriated Cultural Property managed by the Carabinieri TPC Command had yielded negative results. It was the further investigations of the Command’s investigators, carried out in collaboration with the FBI service in Washington, D.C., that made it possible to prove the traceability of the precious mosaic to illicit excavations carried out in Italy, at an unspecified date, and to obtain its return.

Source: MiBAC

Italy recovers two valuable stolen goods in the US: a Roman mosaic and a letter from St. John Bosco

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