Eight important paintings belonging to the heritage of the Italian State, from Paolo Veneziano to Spinello Aretino, are "illegitimately detained" in the national museum of Serbia, in Belgrade, where they arrived in a mysterious and daring way immediately after the war: this is what the Bologna prosecutor's office claims, which for years he hunted down these paintings, obtaining their confiscation in 2018. However, the Serbian authorities have always responded scathingly to requests for letters rogatory requesting the return of the paintings to Italy.
But now it turns out that the disputed paintings could be not eight, but more than double: at least 17.
The judicial investigation - reconstructed and in-depth in Mursia's forthcoming book "Bottino diwar", by journalists Tommaso Romanin and Vincenzo Sinapi - takes action in 2014, when an officer of the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Florence, doing a routine search on the web, came across a painting exhibited in an exhibition held in Bari and Bologna ten years earlier, between 2004 and 2005.
Purchased by Goering, Hitler's right-hand man, during the Second World War, the painting was illicitly exported to Germany.
Investigations discovered that seven other paintings had followed the same path.
All eight, the "eight prisoners of war" were part of 166 objects taken away by scam in 1949 from the Central collecting point in Munich, starring the Croatian fixer Ante Topic Mimara and ended up in Belgrade.
The Bolognese investigation, coordinated by prosecutor Roberto Ceroni, concluded with a sentence from judge Gianluca Petragnani Gelosi now final and it is not clear what the next steps will be, but the journalistic investigation has added new pieces and discovered that the disputed paintings could be more.
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