Once you’ve located a potential site, probe the ground with the metal rod until you find nothingness. “You can’t buy them.” He made two from rusting agricultural implements, heating and bending the metal into shape to get a metre-long rod. “You cut a slice into it, like a corkscrew, which gathers the earth, so you can tell if it’s tomb earth or not.” Then you take your rod, and you go for a walk. To those who can read the land, tomb sites are visible enough: the grass might be drier, because of the empty space underneath In winter, the snow might look different. “That’s where they’d have lived, and they always put their necropolis on a hill nearby.” Gianni has read up on the Etruscans. It’s out of genuine curiosity about his ancestors, he says, but he’s equally passionate about the tricks for pillaging their tombs “You make a metal rod,” says Gianni.
But its Etruscan history still lies mostly under the green farmland Gianni points to the hill opposite. Ferrentum’s Roman past has been officially excavated by the Archaeological Superintendency, as an impressive amphitheatre and mosaic floors make clear. Necropolises abound across this central Italian belt, and though many have been dug up – like the stunning tombs at Cerveteri, an hour from Rome – there are still pickings left for Gianni.Gianni takes me for a walk near the site of the ancient town of Ferrentum, just off a highway on the way to Viterbo in Lazio. More importantly for Gianni, they also buried it, at the conclusion of lavish three-day funeral ceremonies, along with bowls, pots and other income-generating cultural objects. I had to pour about 25 litres of oil into it since we started the trip because it has a small oil leak. Gianni may be a humble tomb-raider, but he’s the first link on a chain that can end with the biggest and most powerful names in art, too close to home for comfort.As tomb-raiders go, Gianni is a relative novice.
Sotheby’s auction house was exposed by the investigative reporter Peter Watson as a standard transit point for looted southern Italian vases, and closed down its London antiquities auctions as a result. Then they end up in private collections, which you’d expect, and in museums, which you might not. In the past, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Paul Getty Museum have both been accused of buying items with murky histories. From Italy, Peru, Iraq, Cambodia, looted artefacts usually pass through London, the biggest legal and illegal art market in the world. The market for illegal antiquities from Italy, says Annamaria Moretti, the archaeological superintendent for Lazio, “is flourishing” The loot always finds buyers.
And the buyers are invariably, somewhere along the line, based in Britain.The global looting market – worth £1bn a year, according to some – always flows one way: from antiquities-rich countries to rich countries. Looters these days have better technology and better networks. Eighteenth and 19th-century gentlemen considered tomb-raiding a polite activity But the early 21st century is boom-time. Professor Salvatore Settis, a leading archaeologist and head of Pisa’s Scuola Normale – Italy’s Oxbridge – called it “shameful” and “an invitation to do-it-yourself archeological digging.”As if there aren’t problems enough Looting is an ancient activity The Romans raided * Etruscan tombs for bronze and gold. Colonel Giovanni Pastore, vice-commander of the Carabinieri Unit for Safeguarding Cultural Protection, or art squad, wants to be diplomatic, but even he calls it “scandalous”.
