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When mafiosas aren’t drug trafficking or money laundering, it turns out some of them are busy collecting (stealing) valuable artwork.
Eighty works, confiscated by the Italian authorities, went on show at Milan‘s Palazzo Reale this week. The exhibition, “Save Arts: From Confiscations to Public Collections,” features paintings, graphic works, and sculptures by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, and other prominent artists.
Italian investigator Maria Rosaria Lagana said, “Works destined to remain buried in the networks of organised crime are finally returned to the community, taking on a symbolic role as resistance to crime.”
“It’s a rebirth for these works. It is a bit like digging them out of the earth, like archaeologists, and putting them on display where everyone can see them,” she added.
The artworks on show are from the beginning of the 20th century to the early 2000s and include a Dalí lithograph of Romeo and Juliet and a piece from Warhol’s “Summer Arts in the Parks” series.
Previewed in Rome last month, the traveling show opened in Milan on December 3 and runs until the end of January before moving to Reggio Calabria, the southern Italian city and stronghold of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia group. It will close in April before the artworks are donated to several state museums in the country.
Italian police confiscated at least 20 of the works from the boss of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia in 2016. Others were seized from an international money laundering network that was dismantled in 2013.
Newspaper cuttings and videos of police recovering the artworks, which were used as currency in arms and drug trafficking, also feature in the show.
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One of the most notorious cases of the mafia stealing valuable paintings played out in 2016, when Italian investigators recovered two Vincent van Gogh works from a property near Naples belonging to the incarcerated boss Raffaele Imperiale. They had been stolen from a museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and were estimated to be worth up to $55 million each.
