The Medici Conspiracy

The Medici Conspiracy reports on the illicit trade in classical antiquities and on the route by which looted objects travelled out of Italian soil and into major museums and private collections. Watson and Todeschini, working from Italian police and judicial investigations, describe a chain that begins with the tombaroli, the tomb raiders who dig illegally at ancient sites, and runs through middlemen, smugglers and dealers to wealthy buyers abroad. The book takes its title from an Italian dealer whose Geneva premises were searched by investigators, and whose seized photographic records, the authors report, showed objects at successive stages between excavation and sale. Using that material and the investigators' files, the authors follow named pieces to named institutions and set out how ownership histories were assembled so that recently excavated objects could appear to have been long in circulation. The wider case the book makes is that this traffic has depleted the archaeological record of Europe and destroyed the buried context that gives excavated objects much of their meaning, and that the demand side of the market, the collectors and the museums that bought without asking, is what sustained it.

Written from the public record for the book.

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People

• Peter Watson