[CPProt.net] Italy and the Met (Italian version of this week's meeting betweenDe Montebello and Buttiglioni, and the result of the meeting)

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

This is the Italian versionof the result of the meeting
 

Met Will Return Disputed Art to Italy, Culture Minister Says 

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is prepared to
return disputed antiquities to Italy in a compromise discussed at a meeting
in Rome today between the Met's director and Italian officials, Culture
Minister Rocco Buttiglione said. 

The items include a 2,500-year-old wine pot, or krater, by the Greek artist
Euphronios that Italian prosecutors say was robbed from a tomb outside Rome,
and a 15-piece set of Hellenistic silver they say was looted at Morgantina
in Sicily, Buttiglione said. 

``If we have conclusive evidence, and we think we have, then they are ready
to give it back,'' Buttiglione said in an interview after meeting with the
Met's director, Philippe de Montebello. 

De Montebello declined to comment. In a statement, the museum said the
meeting ``was constructive and could pave the way to a mutually satisfactory
arrangement.'' 

The museum director attended almost six hours of meetings at the Culture
Ministry with Buttiglione and Italian archaeologists, lawyers and police
officers involved in tracing the illicit antiquities trade. 

The two sides agreed on a tentative plan to return some of the more than 30
disputed items while also respecting the needs of the Metropolitan,
Buttiglione and other Italian participants in the meetings said. 

``Why don't we work on a long-term loan that allows them to keep their
exhibitions?'' Buttiglione said. ``At the end of the period, they give them
back to us and we substitute them with other pieces.'' 

Board of Trustees 

``Of course Mr. de Montebello has to talk to his board of trustees and he
cannot make the decision on his own, but it seems that there is a conceptual
basis,'' Buttiglione added. 

By holding talks and demanding the return of objects, Italy aims to end
collecting practices that encourage illegal excavation and to work more
closely with foreign museums through joint scholarship, art loans and
collaboration on legitimate archaeological digs, Buttiglione and other
officials have said. 

Museums are under increasing pressure to return artifacts from their
collections, in part because the former antiquities curator of the J. Paul
Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True, is on trial in Rome for handling
looted art. She denies the charges. Greece said yesterday it is taking legal
action to win the return of four antiquities from the Getty. 

``Lights are going on at museums all over the United States, not just New
York,'' said Malcolm Bell, an archeologist at the University of Virginia,
who heads the excavations at Morgantina and has made repeated appeals to the
Met for the return of the silver. 

Evidence of Looting 

In one Italian court case, U.S. dealer Robert Hecht is on trial for
supplying looted art -- including the 15-piece silver set and the krater --
to the Metropolitan and other museums. Hecht, 86, has denied the charges. 

When the Met bought the pot for $1 million in 1972, the museum said it came
from a man in Lebanon whose father had bought it earlier in the century.
Italian police said it was freshly looted from a tomb in Cerveteri, near
Rome. 

True and another former Getty curator, Jiri Frel, have said in depositions
that a curator at the Metropolitan told them he knows the site in Cerveteri
from which the krater was taken, court records show. 

True said the curator, Dietrich von Bothmer, pointed out the spot to her on
an aerial photo. 

Von Bothmer, who isn't accused of any wrongdoing, said he doesn't know where
the krater came from. 

Met Curator 

``If they can blame it on me, an older man, that's easily done,'' von
Bothmer, 87, said in a telephone interview from his office at the Met. ``I
did not see what they are talking about.'' 

Prosecutors are also using a memoir written by Hecht and taken in a search
of his Paris home, which provides contradictory accounts of the krater's
origins -- one that matches the Italians' charges, and one that supports his
defense. Hecht says the allegedly incriminating one is a work of fiction. 



To contact the reporter on this story:
Vernon Silver in Rome at  vtsilver at bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 22, 2005 15:53 EST