When mafiosas are not involved in drug trafficking or money laundering, some of them appear to be busy collecting (stealing) valuable works of art.


Eighty works, seized by the Italian authorities, were exhibited in Milan‘s Palazzo Reale this week. The exhibition ‘Save Arts: From Confiscations to Public Collections’ features paintings, graphic works and sculptures by Andy WarholSalvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and other prominent artists.


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Italian researcher Maria Rosaria Lagana said: “Works destined to remain buried in organized crime networks are ultimately returned to the community and take on a symbolic role of resistance against crime.”


“It’s a rebirth for these works. It’s a bit like, like archaeologists, digging them out of the earth and putting them on display for everyone to see,” she added.


The artworks on display date from the early 20th century to the early 2000s and include a Dalí lithograph of Romeo and Juliet and a piece from Warhol’s ‘Summer Arts in the Parks’ series.


The traveling show, which debuted in Rome last month, opened in Milan on December 3 and will run until the end of January before moving to Reggio Calabria, the southern Italian city and stronghold of the mafia group ‘Ndrangheta’. It closes in April before the artworks are donated to various state museums in the country.


Italian police seized at least twenty works by the boss of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia in 2016. Others were seized from an international money laundering network that was dismantled in 2013.


Newspaper clippings and videos of police recovering the artworks, which were used as currency in arms and drug trafficking, are also featured in the show.


One of the most infamous cases of the mafia stealing valuable paintings occurred in 2016, when Italian investigators recovered two works by Vincent van Gogh at a property near Naples belonging to jailed boss Raffaele Imperiale. They were stolen from a museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and had an estimated value of around $55 million each.


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