Traveling in Europe and around the world, especially in the United States, it is possible to appreciate many Italian works in non-Italian museums: it is the result of wars, raids, political agreements or illicit trafficking. Walking through the Prado, in Madrid, you will find works by Botticelli, Mantegna and Beato Angelico; at the National Gallery in London there are many Veronese and Titian; at the Louvre there is Leonardo, but also Ghirlandaio, Giotto, Tintoretto and Perugino; at the Metropolitan Museum in New York there is Caravaggio and so on.
In France, given that there are those acquired legally (such as the Mona Lisa), many works stolen by Napoleon’s troops are preserved. The most famous of these stolen works is probably Wedding at Cana of Veronese, stolen during the Italian campaign of 1796-1797 from the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, on the island of the same name in the Venetian lagoon. Even after the fall of Napoleon, the work was never returned and today it is located in the Louvre Museum (in the same room as the Mona Lisa).
Then there were the raids Nazis at the end of the Second World War: this is how eight Italian works ended up in Belgrade, Serbia, including a couple by Vittore Carpaccio. The most famous of the works stolen by the Nazis, however, is still missing: let’s talk about the Head of Faun by Michelangelo, taken from the castle of Poppi (Arezzo) by German soldiers and never seen again.
Speaking of Nazism, there were cases in which the works were sold for political agreementsfor example to the Nazi hierarchs during fascism. The example of the is famous Discus thrower Lancellottia Roman copy of a famous Greek statue, given as a gift to Hitler by Mussolini, and laboriously returned to Italy (but not without German protests).
Sometimes, however, it was all one financial issue: the case of the large collection of works by the so-called Primitives (pre-Renaissance, such as Botticelli) of the noble Giovanni Pietro Campana is particular. His financial failure in the mid-nineteenth century caused the collection to be seized by the Papal State and the works were then scattered throughout Europe: some in Russia, some in France and so on.
The extremely profitable investment represented by works of art, especially if ancient, has also led over the centuries to the phenomenon of looting of archaeological sites (Greeks, Romans and Etruscans) on Italian soil and the plundering of churches. The collection of the English merchant Edward Solly was gleaned between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with the complicity of Italian merchants) precisely through these undue thefts, which is why the so-called Solly Madonna by Raphael is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Again in this context, there was also a great stir in the case ofvictorious athlete from Fanoa bronze sculpture from the 4th century BC. C. (attributed to Lisippos) found off the coast of Fano and stolen in the United States: it is currently located in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, the same museum which in 2022 also gave us another important sculpture, Orpheus and the Sirensnow at the Archaeological Museum of Taranto.
