Italy gets back 266 antiquities from New York seizures and Houston museum

Italy is celebrating the return of 266 antiquities that were looted and sold to museums and private collectors in the United States. The returned items include artifacts recently seized in New York from a storage unit belonging to a British antiquities dealer. The art unit of Italy’s Carabinieri paramilitary police said the haul that arrived in Rome on Friday also included 65 objects from Houston’s Menil Collection. It says the owner of the Houston museum collection “spontaneously” gave back the items after investigators determined they had come from clandestine excavations of archaeological sites. The Manhattan district attorney's office says coins, mosaics and vases are among the recovered antiquities.