Parthenon marbles, a fragment from Italy to Athens

NEW YORK - Italy leads the way and a fragment of the Parthenon marbles from Palermo will soon fly to Athens.

The agreement with the Greek ministry for culture and sport is in the pipeline and sees two nations united on the same front for centuries victims of theft of antiquities.

It could be a model for what Greece would like Britain to do, which holds most of the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum and has so far stubbornly opposed repatriation.

Other museums hold fragments of the Parthenon friezes, including the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna and the National Museum in Copenhagen.

The one at the center of the Italo-Greek agreement - with the foot and part of Artemis's dress - comes from the eastern frieze of the temple of Athena and is currently in the Antonio Salinas Archaeological Museum of the Sicilian capital. As required by Italian law, it will be the subject of a four-year loan to the Acropolis Museum with the possibility of renewal for another four years. The agreement is expected to be finalized by the end of December to coincide with the anniversary year of Greece's independence. This is not a return. The fragment has already been loaned previously (to the same Acropolis Museum just inaugurated between 2008 and 2010), but never for such a long period. In exchange, first a statue of Athena and then a protogeometric vase from the eighth century BC will arrive at the Salinas,period prior to the Greek domination in Sicily.

The agreement follows the lines of an offer made in November by Athens to Great Britain: on the eve of a meeting with Boris Johnson, the Greek premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis had renewed the request for the return of the Parthenon marbles, offering in exchange archaeological treasures of his Country. Recently Downing Street, washing its hands of the controversy, had made it known that the decision on the future of the reliefs rests with the museum's board of directors: a move that is actually meaningless in the absence of legislative updates to the current rules on decommissioning by British museums. The marbles Pericles commissioned to Phidias were removed from the Acropolis more than 200 years ago by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, who at the time was British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.Friezes and metopes were then sold to the British Museum for 35,000 pounds of gold at the time, while the 'Palermo' fragment ended up in the hands of Robert Fagan, archaeologist and painter who at that time was British consul in Sicily. Fagan committed suicide in 1816 and his young widow sold the materials of his excavations to the Vatican, while the fragment of the Parthenon ended up (or remained) in Palermo.