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When mafiosas aren’t drug trafficking or cash laundering, it seems a few of them are busy gathering (stealing) precious paintings.
Eighty works, confiscated by the Italian authorities, went on present at Milan‘s Palazzo Reale this week. The exhibition, “Save Arts: From Confiscations to Public Collections,” options work, graphic works, and sculptures by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, and different outstanding artists.
Italian investigator Maria Rosaria Lagana stated, “Works destined to stay buried within the networks of organised crime are lastly returned to the neighborhood, taking up a symbolic position as resistance to crime.”
“It’s a rebirth for these works. It’s a bit like digging them out of the earth, like archaeologists, and placing them on show the place everybody can see them,” she added.
The artworks on present are from the start of the twentieth century to the early 2000s and embody a Dalí lithograph of Romeo and Juliet and a chunk from Warhol’s “Summer season Arts within the Parks” sequence.
Previewed in Rome final month, the touring present opened in Milan on December 3 and runs till the top of January earlier than shifting to Reggio Calabria, the southern Italian metropolis and stronghold of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia group. It’ll shut in April earlier than the artworks are donated to a number of state museums within the nation.
Italian police confiscated no less than 20 of the works from the boss of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia in 2016. Others had been seized from a global cash laundering community that was dismantled in 2013.
Newspaper cuttings and movies of police recovering the artworks, which had been used as forex in arms and drug trafficking, additionally characteristic within the present.
Probably the most infamous circumstances of the mafia stealing precious work performed out in 2016, when Italian investigators recovered two Vincent van Gogh works from a property close to Naples belonging to the incarcerated boss Raffaele Imperiale. That they had been stolen from a museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and had been estimated to be price as much as $55 million every.
