An important piece ofEtruscan art returns to Bologna’s public collections. Yesterday, in the Conference Room of Bologna’s Museo Civico Archeologico, the commander of the Nucleo Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale of Bologna, Carmelo Carraffa, officially handed over to the museum’s director, Paola Giovetti, a bronze statuette depicting an Etruscan warrior, partial proceeds of the theft reported on Oct. 30, 1963, against the same museum institute. The ceremony was held in the presence of civil and military authorities from the province of Bologna, marking the conclusion of a long and complex affair of dispersal, investigation and recovery.
The return of the artifact represents the result of a well-established international cooperation between the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale and foreign police and judicial authorities. In this specific case, the investigation was conducted jointly with the New York District Attorney’s Office and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations. It was the U.S. authorities themselves who informed the Carabinieri TPC of the discovery of the bronze, which had been purchased by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, thus enabling them to initiate the necessary procedures for the repatriation and return to Italy by the U.S. museum of an archaeological asset illegally taken from the state’s heritage.
The investigative activity is part of the broader fight against the illicit trafficking of cultural goods, which over the years has seen the involvement of structured criminal syndicates. The investigations reconstructed a system initiated by several Italian individuals already known to law enforcement agencies, who used gangs of grave robbers to loot carefully selected and poorly guarded archaeological sites on the national territory. The artifacts, once illegally extracted, were subjected to cleaning and restoration operations and accompanied by false certificates of provenance, before being placed on the international market through auction houses, galleries, and museum institutions.
At the end of the complex matching activities carried out by the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale Command, it was possible to ascertain with certainty the correspondence between the statuette found in the United States and the one stolen in 1963 from the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna. This step made it possible to proceed with the formal recovery of the artifact and its return to the Museum, where it will once again become available to the public as an integral part of the city’s historical and archaeological heritage.
The bronze statuette, datable to the fifth century B.C.E., depicts a warrior in the act of hurling a spear and can be identified with a martial figure that could represent the god Mars, known in the Etruscan world as Laran, a deity particularly venerated in the Umbrian area. The statuette, 22 centimeters high, 8.9 centimeters wide and 7 centimeters deep, is made of bronze and displays an essential and schematic formal language. The warrior wears a short cuirass that leaves the lower part of the body uncovered and carries an imposing crested helmet on his head, elements that emphasize its symbolic and votive function.
It is in fact a votive gift, intended to be placed in a sacred context, such as a shrine or a stipe, with the aim of soliciting the favor of the deity or as thanksgiving for a grace received. The artifact is part of the group of bronze statuettes produced in the Etruscan-Italic, or more precisely northern Umbrian, environment, according to the classification worked out by the Etruscologist Giovanni Colonna between the 1960s and 1970s. The typology of the assaulting warrior is widely attested in the Etruscan, Umbrian, and central-Italic contexts and includes both productions of high formal quality and more schematic and popular specimens, as in the case of this bronze statuette.
The work originally belonged to the University Collection and later joined the collections of the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna. At places of worship in pre-Roman Italy, the practice of offering symbolic objects to deities was widespread, a devotional gesture that over time was structured into a craft production specifically intended for worship. Alongside representations of sacrificed animals and vessels used for offerings, images of the offerer or the deity worshipped were frequent, as were anatomical votive offerings related to the request or thanksgiving for a healing.
The return of the bronze artifact follows one made in 2023 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, which was also made possible through a collaboration between the New York District Attorney’s Office, Homeland Security Investigations and the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Command. The return of this artifact represents not only an investigative success, but also a significant moment of rebuilding the historical memory of the Museum and its collections, which were hard hit by the 1963 theft.
With the official handover on December 19, 2025, the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna reacquires a work of great historical and symbolic value, which returns to tell the public about a fundamental page of Etruscan culture and the history of archaeological collecting in the city. The recovery of the bronze is thus part of a broader effort to protect cultural heritage, reaffirming the principle of restitution as an essential tool of cultural justice and safeguarding collective historical identity.
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| Bologna, a rare Etruscan bronze stolen in 1963 returned to the Archaeological Museum |
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