A man convicted of looting Italy's archeological treasures allowed a rare glimpse into the world of art smuggling when he testified on Wednesday in the trial of a former J. Paul Getty Museum curator.
Pietro Casasanta recalled half a century spent looting archeological treasures across the country, benefiting from what he said was a free-for-all environment that allowed smugglers and merchants to make a fortune by selling antiquities in Italy and abroad.
Italian authorities say top European and US museums took advantage of that atmosphere to acquire looted Roman, Greek and Etruscan artifacts.
As part of their efforts to recover the lost treasures, they have placed former Getty curator Marion True and American art dealer Robert Hecht on trial in Rome, accused of knowingly trafficking in stolen artifacts.
True did not attend Wednesday's proceedings, but Hecht was in court. Both defendants deny wrongdoing.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts have agreed to return antiquities, but negotiations with the Los Angeles museum over 47 contested artifacts have been stalled for months.
Casasanta said he had never met or made business with the defendants, but was testifying for the prosecution to present a broad look on how the illegal antiquities market functioned in Italy. Most of his discoveries were sold to local antique dealers in Rome although he said he could not rule out that some had been later passed on to international merchants.
Casasanta, 68, has served time in jail for art trafficking and is still on trial over some of the thousands of artifacts he uncovered during brazen illegal digs.
The raider defended his actions, saying that the underground antiquities trade was tolerated for decades until authorities started the recent crackdown. He also claimed he had saved art that would have been otherwise destroyed in development projects.
"From one day to the next we went from art experts to criminals," he said. "I saved thousands of artifacts that would have been ground into cement ... It's a shame that they don't make me a senator for life."
Although security may have been more lax in previous decades, prosecutor Paolo Ferri noted that rules against art trafficking were well in place, including a 1939 law making all antiquities found in the country state property.
Casasanta told the court he would poke around construction sites and find treasures in piles of earth that had been dug up. But he also organized his own vast excavations, working in daylight with two or three people using bulldozers over thousands of square meters.
Guided by a self-styled code of honor, Casasanta said he concentrated mainly on the ruins of ancient Roman villas in the countryside around the Italian capital, refusing to loot the art-rich Etruscan tombs that are one of preferred targets of Italy's tombaroli, or grave robbers.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS