Paolo Ferri
Italian prosecutor dubbed the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ of antiquities
PAOLO FERRI, who has died aged 72, was an Italian prosecutor, investigator and antiquities hunter with Rome’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage; his career was dedicated to returning ill-gotten antiquities and cultural artefacts to their rightful countries.
As public prosecutor in Rome, he was the first person to do this through the courts, challenging museums and corrupt dealers along the way. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica described him as “a true Sherlock Holmes of archaeology”.
Overseeing criminal cases for the Italian Ministry of Culture, Ferri became a scourge of art predators. His most famous haul came when he orchestrated a raid in 1995 on a building in Geneva run by an Italian art dealer named Giacomo Medici. The vast operation became known as the Medici conspiracy.
The building, raided by Italian and Swiss police, was found to contain an invaluable haul of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art (including a set of Etruscan dinner places valued at $2 million) – as well as records relating to Medici’s business and collaborators. Most importantly, there were meticulously annotated Polaroids of artefacts which gave clues to their provenance.
Medici was found to be at the head of an organisation responsible for the looting of some of the most valuable Mediterranean artefacts in the world, which were then laundered via art dealers and renowned museums.
Thanks to Ferri, Medici was convicted in 2004, sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined 10 million euros – the largest penalty ever imposed for crimes against antiquities in Italy.
Ferri made it his mission to expose an ugly truth – that since the 1960s museums in America and Europe had been buying looted material from the criminal underworld.
Beginning in 2006, this gave rise to the “Great Give Back”, whereby American museums returned antiquities, estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, to the Greek and Italian authorities, although provenance was sometimes a matter of contention.
Paolo Ferri was born in Rome on October 19 1947. He studied Law at Sapienza University of Rome and started his career as a magistrate in 1977, initially as a judge and then as a public prosecutor in Rome until the early 1990s, when he took a position with the Cultural Ministry.
His first foray into stolen artefacts came in 1994, when he investigated the theft of a statue taken from Villa Torlonia in Rome, which then turned up at auction at Sotheby’s in London. The investigation led him to discover many items of great cultural significance housed in prominent museums.
What became known as “the great raid” carried on during the period 1970 to 2000, when, according to experts, some one million items were illegally taken from Italy and the most valuable sold abroad. By his own account, Ferri investigated at least 2,500 people.
One of his most famous recoveries was the Krater of Euphronios, a large 515BC terracotta wine-mixing bowl decorated with scenes from The Iliad, which had been looted from an Etruscan tomb.
The bowl was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by the collector and dealer Robert Hecht for $1.2 million in 1972; evidence suggested that he had purchased it from Medici.
Charges against Hecht were dismissed owing to the statute of limitations, but the Krater was repatriated to Italy in 2006, and is now in the Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri.
Ferri also went after the British dealer Robin Symes, who was sent to prison in 2005 after being found to have hidden a huge hoard of illegally acquired antiquities in a warehouse in Switzerland.
Ten years ago Ferri was made International Expert in Cultural Goods for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Paolo Ferri, who had recently retired, is survived by his wife Marita and a daughter.
Paolo Ferri, born October 17 1947, died June 14 2020