Priceless 2,400-year-old frescoes looted from a necropolis in southern Italy decades ago went on show to the public in Rome Thursday following their recent recovery by Italian police.
"We have deployed all the best [investigative] energies we have in the country, which are among the best in the world," to recover the artworks, culture minister Dario Franceschini said.
"I can't say more than this," he added.
The five frescoes from the 3rd or 4th century BC are from one of the painted tombs of Paestum, a UNESCO World Heritage site in southern Italy originally founded by the ancient Greeks near the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.
The frescoes show a noblewoman and her slave girls, a warrior on horseback returning home with the spoils of war and a young man walking with a donkey.
Each slab has a ragged crack across the middle, having been cut in half to make smuggling easier. Paestum's site director Gabriel Zuchtriegel described "devastating" the illegal digs that had yielded the five frescoes.
The frescoes were recovered in March in Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave in Swiss territory, after a ten-year police investigation.
Police were led to the artefacts, all dating from around 400 BC, after an international trafficker known as "The Captain" died in a road accident, leaving thousands of photographs of archaeological finds in his car.
The treasures will be on display to the public at the Carabinieri museum in Rome until 10 January and then returned to Paestum.
Some 200 painted tombs from the Lucani, the people who ruled Paestum before the Romans, were discovered during excavations of the site during the 1960s.
