The paintings stolen by the Nazis are in Belgrade and Italy wants them back

Eight important paintings belonging to the heritage of the Italian State, from Paolo Veneziano to Spinello Aretino, are "illegitimately detained" in the national museum of Serbia, in Belgrade , where they arrived in a mysterious and daring way in the immediate post-war period: this is what the prosecutor's office of Bologna claims, which has been chasing these paintings for years, obtaining their confiscation in 2018. However, the Serbian authorities have always replied in spite of rogatory requests asking for the paintings to be returned to Italy. But now it turns out that the disputed paintings may not be eight, but more than twice as many: at least 17.

The judicial enquiry - reconstructed and analysed in depth in the book soon to be published by Mursia 'War booty', by journalists Tommaso Romanin and Vincenzo Sinapi - started in 2014, when a deputy of the Carabinieri Tutela patrimonio culturale in Florence, doing a routine web search, came across a painting exhibited in an exhibition in Bari and Bologna 10 years earlier, between 2004 and 2005. However, that painting was not supposed to be there: it turns out that, having been purchased by Goering, Hitler's right-hand man, during the Second World War, the painting had been illegally exported to Germany and was included in the list of cultural assets that were wanted and to be returned to Italy.

Subsequent investigations opened a Pandora's box at the Belgrade Museum, where the Carabinieri discovered another seven paintings that had followed the same route. All eight of them - the 'eight prisoners of war', masterpieces by artists active between the 14th and 16th century - were part of 166 objects taken by deception in 1949 from the Central Collecting Point in Munich, i.e. the facility where the Allies had crammed the art looted by the Nazis in occupied countries.

According to the documents of the investigation, the main perpetrator of the fraud was a Croatian businessman, Ante Topic Mimara, who presented himself at the Collecting Point as the 'Yugoslav representative for restitution, fine arts and monuments' and, with the complicity of a young German official of the Centre, who shortly afterwards became his wife, managed to obtain 50 paintings, 8 icons and a large number of ancient and precious objects. By the time the Allied Monuments Men realised the fraud and demanded the works of art, owned by Italy and several other European countries, back from the then Yugoslavia, it was too late.

Mimara, who, according to some, was a spy, is in the wind and Belgrade says it knows nothing about the affair. The fact remains that the entire booty resurfaced many years later, on display in the halls of the National Museum of Serbia, closed for renovation for a long period during which the paintings were restored, inventoried and catalogued, ironically, with the cooperation of the Italian Government and some unwitting Superintendencies.