The southern German state of Bavaria has returned valuable art and cultural artefacts to Italy.
The vice president of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office(LKA), Guido Limmer, handed over the 14 items to the authorities inRome, officials said in Munich on Monday.
They were stolen from Italian museums or dug up illegally years ago and smuggled to Bavaria.
The items returned included a Corinthian bronze helmet that a man had illegally brought to Bavaria and four Roman-Byzantine gold coins stolen from the National Archaeological Museum in Parma in 2009.
The investigators discovered some of them in stores, while others were privately owned. In addition, a more than 2,500-year-old bowl with motifs from Greek mythology, which was registered as Italian Cultural Property, was returned. It had been illegally exported from Italy and was to beauctioned off in a Munich auction house.
The Cultural Property Protection Act came into force in August 2016,criminalising the illegal export and import of cultural property to and from Germany and illegal trade in it.
According to the office of Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, around 2,000 objects have been returned to EU member states since the regulation came into force.
“Today’s return not only secures and preserves important cultural heritage, it also once again proves the effectiveness of the Cultural Property Protection Act,” Roth said in a statement in Berlin. — dpa
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