Treasure Hunt

After World War II, the Italian government posted 20-ft. watchtowers with searchlights along the watery plains of the Po River delta, set up a special new intelligence corps and dispatched motorized patrols to strategic spots in the hills of central Italy. The time had come, said the government, to break up the booming $8,000,000-a-year black market in Etruscan art objects. Beneath hill and plain lay buried treasure--the vases, statues and coins that the energetic Etruscans had placed in the tombs 25 centuries ago. This was part of the "national patrimony," said the government, and no one would be allowed to dig up or sell them without government permit.

The glory of the Etruscans, which the historian Livy described as filling earth and sea, predates Roman civilization, and is now one of the favorite quests of archaeologists. But authorized diggers frequently find that robbers have got there first. And even with the new watch, the thefts continued. One enterprising youth rode up to a grave with his girl on a motor scooter for a "picnic," rode off with 13 objects worth $32,000 in his kit.

The Cigar Disguise. Etruscan grave robbing is now thought to involve a network of 200 thieves, 25 middlemen and a dozen fences. Last year the government's special contraband corps arrested 89 looters. Not realizing that much of the booty is stolen, and some faked, Americans bought 85% of the Etruscan objects in respectable-looking shops. Customs officers, traditionally easygoing with American tourists, let them pass. "Americans could walk out of Italy with the Colosseum," complained one contraband officer. But last month frontier customs guards caught an Austrian carrying a vase dating from the 6th century B.C. He got it, he said casually, from "old Renn-Rain."

Disguising themselves as American tourists with cigars and cameras as props, contraband officers called at the fashionable antique shop of "F. Renn-Rain--world famous and unique," just below Rome's Spanish Steps. There was nothing Etruscan to be seen, but the salesman steered them around the corner to a 17th century palace at No. 77 Via della Croce. First, the officers put a watch on No. 77, keeping an eye on middlemen entering and purchasers leaving the place. Last week officers raided No. 77 and confiscated what they called the "greatest hoard of looted archaeological treasures ever found in Italy." In the old palace, crowded with pressed butterflies and Victorian lamps, they found 15,000 antique items without a single legal permit, including nine showcases stacked with Etruscan vases, cups, coins, marble statuary. Four thousand pieces were rated "important," some priceless.

"Nonsense." Franz Renn-Rain, 72, an Austrian who years ago abandoned his study for the priesthood to sell art in Italy, denied that he was "the master archaeological fence." Flapping about the palace in a stained silk dressing gown, he mourned: "Nonsense, nonsense, it's a small collection of little things. So I let my friends come to look at my collection. So I let them buy a few things. So I export something to America once in a while. What is all this talk about Etruscan antiquities? Nobody can prove the Etruscans even existed."

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