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WASHINGTON -- Seven ancient objects looted from Italy, including three music sheets from choir books dating back to the 13th century recovered in McMinnville, will be on their way home following a return ceremony Thursday.
Janet Napolitano, secretary of the federal Department of Homeland Security returned the antiquities to Italian Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero at the Embassy of Italy in Washington.
Italy's Maxxi museum, which opened just two years ago, has been hard hit by the country's economic problems, which have resulted in widespread cuts in cultural funding. Now the high-profile art museum, designed by architect Zaha Hadid, faces possible closure.
Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi paid large sums of money to the Sicilian Mafia to protect himself and his family from kidnapping in the mid-1970s, Italy's highest appeals court said on Tuesday. Cosa Nostra's protection "was not free", the court said, adding that the media magnate was a victim of extortion.
The Italian government has been persistent, tenacious and very effective in forcing repatriation of its looted antiquities. Seizing the ethical high ground, then playing legal and diplomatic hardball, it has extracted scores of prized objects from American museums. None was hit harder than L.A.'s Getty Museum, which has bid adieu to 40 pieces Italy was able to prove had been illegally dug from its soil.
ROME – Refusing to fade away, Italy’s billionaire media mogul and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has said that new elections in Italy could be months away - and he seemed to hint that just maybe he’d again be a candidate to lead the country.
Police say they have arrested an Italian man in a crackdown on an Islamic extremist network suspected of supporting international terrorism. Alfonso Polverino, an anti-terrorism police official in Cagliari, Sardinia, said the man was arrested early Monday in Pesaro, an Adriatic sea town.Polverino told Sky TG24 TV that the man, not immediately identified, was suspected of training Islamic extremists.
A shameful page in the history of Italian football was written yesterday at Genoa’s Marassi stadium. The merit, or blame, goes to the home fans who caused the Serie A match to be suspended for 45 minutes as their side trailed Siena by four goals. Smoke bombs, firecrackers and threatened pitch invasions were again in evidence as the hooligans who lay down the law at top-flight Italian league games did their worst.
Michael Pevzner of Kingston knows what makes him laugh. And a combination of faith, family, and food tickled his theatrical funny bone enough to know he wanted to do a play with that theme.That mix is the basis of “Over the River and Through the Woods,’’ a production of Nemasket River Productions that Pevzner is directing at the Alley Theatre in Middleborough Friday and Saturday, and May 4-5, with shows at 8 p.m.It was written by Joe DiPietro (“I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,’’), and is about Nick, a single Italian-American from New Jersey who wants to move away, snipping powerful Italian connections with his grandparents, who connive to keep him close.
The shipwrecked Italian cruise liner the Costa Concordia will be refloated and towed away in one piece by a US-owned salvage firm, the ship's owners announced Saturday.
Costa Crociere said Florida-based Titan Salvage will work with Italian marine contractors Micoperi to remove the wreck from waters off the island of Giglio, where it crashed Jan.13, killing 32 people.
Little Italy is having an art attack!
A giant mural of a human figure with a peacock head and a tiger groin, planned for the side of a five-story building on Mulberry Street, has created an inferno in the tradition-minded enclave. “That’s not going up in my courtyard,” Father Fabian Grifone exploded when he saw a rendering of the huge painting that Little Italy merchants have commissioned for a wall overlooking the Most Precious Blood Church — the heart of the annual Feast of San Gennaro.