In the presence of the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, the German Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, and the Italian Ambassador to Berlin, Armando Varricchio, an agreement was signed yesterday in Berlin for the return of 25 objects of Italian provenance belonging to the Foundation for the Cultural Heritage of Prussia (SPK) chaired by Hermann Parzinger and currently on display at the Altes Museum in the classical antiquities collection section. The arrangement was developed as a result of the close cooperation between the Italian and German Ministries of Culture, the Foundation and the Berlin Museum in the operations of evaluating and provenance of cultural goods from illegal excavations or robberies, tracing the path of archaeological collections from their discovery to their entry into exhibition sites. Thanks to the agreement, a valuable funerary trousseau of Appula provenance, consisting of 14 vases and ten decorated plates, as well as a fragment of a fresco from a villa in Boscoreale, is returning to Italy. The funerary trousseau was on the list of goods stolen by notorious art trafficker Giacomo Medici, who was convicted in 2009 of illicit trafficking in cultural property. According to the investigation, it was first acquired by a Swiss family (Cramer collection) and then resold by an antiquities dealer, a certain Christopher Leon, to the Altes Museum for 3 million German marks in 1984.
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