Danish family seek to return Etruscan objects bought from boot of car in Italy

For decades they remained in the loft of the family home in Denmark, exasperating his wife and perplexing his children. Now, inspired by a growing movement of people choosing to return antiquities apparently looted or illegally excavated from their countries of origin, his children are trying to give the items back to Italy.

Buying looted grave goods is obviously wrong and returning them is the right thing to do, said Mads Herman Sndergaard. The antiquities are thought to date from the sixth century BC and believed to have come from an Etruscan tomb.

After seeing him quoted in Guardian reports on other repatriation cases, they sought advice from the archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, a leading specialist in researching international networks of trafficking antiquities.

In 2023, an Irish woman was inspired to return her late father's collection of 19th-century African and Aboriginal objects to their countries of origin after reading in the Guardian.

Read at www.theguardian.com