“The problem was that she had no documents, no information, no nothing,” Del Bufalo explained. “The attorney said, ‘Okay, do you have a receipt, do you have an invoice? … She said, ‘No, I don’t have it.’”
Hmmm. I hope the authorities don't find out about my living room wallpaper...
When one of my uncles returned from Italy after WWII, he gave my grandmother a bronze horse and chariot statuette. He said that the man who sold it to him claimed it came from a Roman ruin. In later years, we found out that after WWII the Italians were churning out all kinds of artifacts and selling them as ancient Roman "finds".
ReplyDeleteI doubt that Helen Fioratti didn't know what she had.
She’d bought the mosaic from an Italian noble family in the 1960s, the New York Times reported in 2017, then handed it off to her Italian ambassador friend who, handling logistics, “smuggled it” to New York on her behalf.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Rebecca, she knew what she had.
we found out that after WWII the Italians were churning out all kinds of artifacts and selling them as ancient Roman "finds". Puts me in mind of The Man in the High Castle; in the Japanese-controlled area depicted in this alternative-history TV series, there was a thriving business selling fake Old West artefacts to high-level Japanese occupation personnel.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Helen knew what she was about.
On the other hand, every Luger P08 in the US was taken from a dead SS General... although great uncle Bob lost the Swastika armband that came with it.
ReplyDeleteI was visiting a friend in Hong Kong and after a day of window shopping, I marveled to him about all of the antiques I saw. He said, "I'm not surprised. They make new ones every day."
ReplyDeleteAnd nice ones, too, I bet!
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