The New York Times has evidence that Italian authorities are preparing a case against American academics for illegally importing artefacts and antiquities even though the museum world was under the impression an understanding had been reached after the Getty case:
According to a 14-page legal notice from the public prosecutor’s office in Rome, J. Michael Padgett, 56, antiquities curator at the Princeton University Museum of Art, is a focus of a criminal investigation of “the illegal export and laundering” of Italian archaeological objects.
Once again an American may be facing a drawn-out legal ordeal, and at least the hypothetical threat of incarceration in a foreign country, for acquiring art for a museum — something that was unheard of before the Getty case, and that many museum professionals believed was not going to happen again.
Also named in the case are a former New York antiquities dealer, Edoardo Almagià, 59, and two other co-defendants. The document identifies nearly two dozen works and groups of works — among them pieces of a calyx krater attributed to the Attic vase painter Euphronios and a group of Etruscan architectural terra-cottas — that it describes as having been looted from Italian sites and “sold, donated or lent” by Mr. Almagià to the Princeton museum through Mr. Padgett from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. According to Princeton nine of these works are in the museum’s collection.
Italy Focuses on a Princeton Curator in an Antiquities Investigation (New York Times)
