Italy invites Metropolitan Museum of Art director

ROME -- Italy's culture minister has invited the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Rome for talks as Italy steps up efforts to recover allegedly looted antiquities from top U.S. museums, the minister said Friday.\nThe invitation came days before the start of a trial that Italian authorities hope will bolster their claims to a 6th-century B.C. painted Greek vase in the Met collection. Italy says the vase -- the Euphronious Krater -- was stolen from a site near Rome.\n"A growing number of American museums are starting to realize that the old system does not work anymore," the culture minister, Rocco Buttiglione, told reporters during the presentation of three ancient objects recently returned from the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. "Italy is not a country open to looting."\nButtiglione declined to give a date for the possible meeting with Met director Philippe de Montebello, saying only that the invitation was made "a few days ago."\nMet senior vice president Harold Holzer declined to comment on the vase but confirmed Italian authorities had invited de Montebello. He said arrangements for a possible meeting were being discussed.\nThe defendants in the Nov. 16 trial are Marion True, the Getty's former chief curator of antiquities, and Paris-based American art dealer Robert E. Hecht Jr., who sold the vase to the Met.\nItalian authorities have charged True and Hecht with conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities. Both deny wrongdoing.\nIn an unpublished memoir seized in a raid on his apartment in 2001, Hecht said he purchased the Euphronious Krater from an Italian dealer, Giacomo Medici, who has been convicted of trafficking in looted antiquities, the Los Angeles Times reported recently.\nWhen he sold the vase to the Met in 1972, Hecht said he had bought it from a Lebanese man whose family had acquired it legally, the Times said. He has dismissed his mention of Medici in his memoirs as "fiction," the newspaper said.\nButtiglione declined to comment on news reports that other renowned U.S. museums might possess looted Italian antiquities.\nButtiglione said Italy might also consider extending the amount of time leases its artworks to museums for from four years to eight.\n"We might consider a longer period of time for those who recognize that these artworks belong to the Italian people, to our culture and tradition," he said. "We need to consider the right of the Italian people as well as the right of others to see these artworks on display."\nOn Friday, officials displayed three items that the Getty recently returned to Italy -- an Etruscan bronze candelabrum, a 2,300-year-old jar and an even older funerary stone dating back to the 6th century B.C. Italy claims the items were taken out of the country illegally.