CC-Villas - Blog

Several times I have already been talking about a phenomenon I used to call the Italian (or should we say “ Mediterranean”?) imaginativeness. Now here we have another case, specific in character, as reported by the “Corriere della Sera”:
At a ceramics factory in Cerveteri, in “joint venture” with others in Canino and Brescia, the Fiamme Gialle (the Italian customs and finance agency) have discovered a somewhat special case of fraud. In close cooperation the three factories hade manufactured an attic vase, a so called Kylix; exposing it to X-rays using hospital equipment – they have achieved a kind of “aging process” with the result that, having gone through various panels of experts on different levels, it was attributed to the 6 th century B.C. It seemed to be truly special an object as it was autographed by one of the two best known ceramic producer of the time, only two other vases of the kind existing today, one in the Louvre, the other one in Villa Giulia in Rome. In the end the vase had been given positive expertise also by the British Museum in London, and the respective market had already started “chasing” the magnificent specimen, from Switzerland to Japan and the Emirates. Now, once the Fiamme Gialle had discovered the attempted fraud, detailed checks of the basic material showed an almost complete lack of chrome and nickel an authentic attic vase would have contained.
It goes without saying that numerous other fakes were found “in the process of development” and that the entire gang was arrested.
Hadn’t the Fiamme Gialle been so clever and lucky, the vase might be the show-piece of a renowned museum somewhere on this globe now – or might have ended in the strong box of a rich individual (and, let us assume it would have gone this way: would this person ever admit he/she had fallen victim to a case of fraud and the crown jewel of his/her collection was a fake?)
Most certainly material for another detective novel of the well-known genre…