Bah.
If they are interested in anything except the imagined tourist dollars, I’ll eat my hat. They didn’t start making noises until the restoration was well under way and the Met realized exactly what it was they had and announced it. That farmer knew he had something or he wouldn’t have contacted anyone. Even dinky villages in Italy knew people were collecting old dug up things like crazy around that time. Those two cows probably meant more to the guy then cash would have. Italy’s not crawling with cows, you know.
I am usually all for the return of stolen artifacts to their home countries. Most of the Egyptain artifacts scattered across the globe were stolen, and the Egyptians have been really good about loaning out collections for the rest of the world to enjoy, so there’s no reason to not return them if they ask for them. In fact, just recently the Egyptians requested that some of their culture’s artifacts in other countries be loaned to Egypt for a temporary exhibit. I believe that the British Museum should return the Parthenon Elgin marbles yesterday, and the Greeks should thank them profusely and reimburse at least part of what the Brits put into taking care of them.
But, and this is important, the Monteleone chariot was not stolen. Sure. I’ll admit that the Frenchmen that bought it from the farmer should have paid more for it on moral grounds, because they knew more of what the find represented then the farmer. But they did pay for it. The export of the pieces was well within Italian Law at the time it occured. That a law that would have prohibited its legal export was put on the books six years later has no bearing on this case.
If these guys were clambering for it to be returned to the Florence Museum, or one of Italy’s other museums, I’d be more willing to believe they were interested in their cultural heritage. I’d be willing to feel for them if they were offering reimbursement of some kind. But they want it back in that remote medieval village that’s off the well worn tourist track where hardly anyone is going to be willing to travel for one artifact, awesome though it is. There’s likely no one nearby that can even take care of thing, and I’ll bet these people have no idea what it takes to maintain something like that chariot. You can’t just stick it in a room and go “Ta-da!”
Sure, Monteleone has a few crumbling medieval churches, one excellent Gothic door, and a small lapidary mueseum. They even have a copy of the chariot. But that doesn’t make them qualified to maintain the real one. Forget the security the thing needs to have on it.
Yes, it’s part of their cultural heritage. It’s also part of the cultural heritage of millions of people of Italian descent world-wide, and they – we – deserve to be able to access it too. Sticking it in a remote village in Umbria is the last thing that needs to happen to it.
The people of Monteleone need to get over themselves. The chariot is in the very best place it can be right where it is.