CERVETERI, Italy - Italy’s biggest prize in the war against looting antiquities went on view recently at the Villa Giulia in Rome. Italians didn’t seem to care much.

The prize is the notorious, magnificent sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York lately returned: the “hot pot,” as Thomas Hoving, the former Met director who bought it in 1972, mischievously took to calling it. A show of recovered spoils at the Quirinale in Rome last year became the pot’s homecoming party, after which it was rushed off to an exhibition in Mantua.

Now it’s ensconced at the villa, its new permanent home, in a bulky glass case with odd little Christmas lights. Maybe overexposure explains why this didn’t strike Italians as particularly big news.

A new book may help revive interest. “The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece,” just published by William Morrow, makes a first-class read out of the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here - and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios, a kylix, or chalice, which was looted from the same spot here in Cerveteri, a town northwest of Rome.

Vernon Silver, a 40-year-old American journalist and a doctoral student in archaeology at Oxford, wrote the book. “This is the whole illicit antiquities trade writ small,” he said. “The two works started out in the hands of the same Greek artist, 2,500 years ago, ended up going through the same shady Italian dealer by different routes to America, one the public route, the other underground, and both end up back here in Italy.”

The tale is one neither Met officials nor Italian authorities will be pleased to find so conscientiously recounted. It turns out that plenty of shenanigans transpired on both sides, even before the Met (obviously without trying too hard to check the facts) paid $1 million, an unprecedented sum at that time, for what was the finest example of painted pottery by the greatest known vase painter of ancient Greece.

The museum’s story was that the krater, illustrating the Homeric tale of the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’ son, belonged to a Lebanese collector. But rumors started circulating that the pot had been looted. The Italian police began hunting for evidence in Cerveteri, the former Etruscan city of Caere, known for its ancient tombs. Not coincidentally, modernday Cerveteri is famous for its tomb robbers.

Mr. Silver returned last month to the patch of countryside on the edge of town where, late in 1971, a lookout watched while five tombaroli, as tomb robbers are called here, tunneled some 4.5 meters down and came upon a complex of ancient burial chambers. They unearthed painted pottery, broken but mostly in tip-top condition.

The man who bought the loot from them later passed it along to a restorer in Switzerland, who repaired the pots before they were sent on to a dealer, who in turn approached the Met. It wasn’t until reading in the newspapers, months later, how much the museum had paid for the krater that the robbers realized that they had themselves been taken advantage of.

It isn’t hard to figure out why the robbers looked here. Local superstition had it that the place was haunted by a demon, so tombaroli steered clear. The demon ended up being an ancient sculpture of a gnarly monster, buried along with other stone sculptures.

To cover their tracks, the looters filled in the tunnels, after which hasty Italian investigators bulldozed the grounds in a curious rush to uncover the ransacked tombs. It became impossible after that to reconstruct how the works had lain when the tombaroli found them. “Had someone properly excavated the site,” Mr. Silver said, “we could have learned so much more about the Etruscans.”

If any doubts remain about whether the Euphronioses were really looted, Francesco Bartocci is still around. So far as he knows, he’s the last survivor among the tombaroli. He acted as the lookout. Now 70, he wanted to make clear that the job was his only stint as a looter : “I’m a farmer, not a tombarolo, but I had a truck, which they needed because there was so much stuff to cart away.”

Mr. Bartocci is glad to hear the Euphronios is back in Italy. “But not in Cerveteri,” he added. “We don’t have an adequate museum here. It would be too dangerous. Somebody might steal it.”





Vernon Silver wrote about a krater’s journey from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York to its new home in Rome.