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The artist Omero Bordo has a message for Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He is prepared to offer the museum what he says is an exact replica (down to the fractures) of the Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old vase that the Met has agreed to surrender to Italy after three decades of haggling over its legal status.
"If the museum is interested, it's a perfect copy, same height, same everything," said Bordo, who made the faux-Etruscan piece about 20 years ago. Of course, he added, some money would have to change hands.
"As they say, no one sings Mass for free," Bordo said.
Should de Montebello wish to inspect the replica of the vase that Italy contends was stolen from Italy's archaeologically rich underbelly 35 years ago, he will have to trek to this former Etruscan stronghold about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, north of Rome and venture into the depths of an underground grotto, beneath one of the city's newer suburbs.
There, Bordo has transformed a mushroom farm that was once an ancient quarry into Etruscopolis, a quirky museum celebrating the art of a civilization that flourished in roughly the eighth to second centuries B.C. The imitation krater is displayed in one of the glass cases that line the 1.5-hectare, or 3.7-acre, underground site, each one filled with "Etruscan" pieces Bordo fashioned by hand.
Bordo, 62, describes himself as an artist who creates "contemporary Etruscan" pieces. Less than 40 years ago, however, he was a self-professed tombarolo, or tomb robber.
His trajectory from clandestine digger to attention-hungry entrepreneur reflects the changing attitudes here regarding the looting of antiquities. In the old days, Bordo said, the government was largely indifferent to the nighttime activity of poor farmers poking about the countryside. But as the artifacts became big business, the state began clamping down, through police action and legal prosecutions.
So Bordo, a talented artist, moved into an equally lucrative field.
"Don't call them fakes; I've never made fakes," Bordo, a compact man with powerful stubby hands and a gravelly voice, said of his pots and frescoes.
Charges of passing off his pieces as the real thing landed him in jail once "30 years ago," he said vaguely, waving off requests for firm details and he is still testy about the subject. (He was also feeling a bit exasperated because he was housebound, his legs spattered with buckshot and bandaged, after what he said was a recent hunting accident.)
"If someone mistakes them for antiques, that's their business," he said.
In an interview in the cramped laboratory attached to his big vine-covered home here, Bordo said he liked to refer to himself as the "last of the Etruscans." "Omero," an autobiography that he has had published in the form of a big picture book, is subtitled "The Rebirth of Etruscan Spirit."
He describes Etruscopolis as the culmination of the lifelong dream of a local boy born amid the wheat fields and pastures that were once the stamping grounds of Etruscan civilization.
When he was a child toddling down country paths, fragments of Etruscan vases were his "first toys," he said; in his teens, he joined in more sophisticated diversions, plundering tombs in a nearby necropolis.
"We didn't know it was forbidden then," Bordo said, pleading ignorance of a 1939 law requiring that any artifact unearthed in Italy be turned over to the state. "There was no vigilance at the time."
In a way, he added, he can claim credit for bringing about the surveillance of archaeological sites. "It was only after they saw that we were doing clandestine digs that they put in the custodians," he said. "So really we saved a lot of art."
Although many tombs have been unearthed in the past century, many more lie untouched. And despite Bordo's assertions, government officials say illegal excavations continue in archaeologically rich areas like northern Latium. Special police officers regularly patrol the area and conduct periodic helicopter reconnaissance missions, but Italy has not succeeded in halting the tomb robbing, the first link in a supply chain that in recent decades has funneled ancient artifacts into collections around the world, including those of some major museums.
Nonetheless, Bordo says, some recent high-profile criminal prosecutions have put a damper on the antiquities market. He cited the case against Marion True, the former antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, who is on trial in Rome with an American dealer, Robert Hecht, on charges of conspiring to deal in illegally looted artifacts.
"No one is digging tombs anymore because no one is buying," he said.
Bordo declined to name the antiquities dealers with whom he did business in past years, but he freely discussed his excavation technique.
To locate an ancient tomb, he normally wielded a long iron rod known as a spillone, digging cautiously here and there under cover of darkness. From the beginning he seemed to have a knack for it, Bordo said. During his first nighttime dig in the 1950s, he found six vases that he sold to a local dealer for 650,000 lire, then an extraordinary amount of money.
By his own account, he hung up his spillone one summer night in 1962 when he and his partner ventured into the hills around Tarquinia and saw the tips of dozens of cigarettes glowing in the dark. "My partner mumbled something about fireflies, but I saw they were new tombaroli," he recalled. "It was the end of an era."
Bordo later turned to art, cranking out thousands of pots and bronze artifacts and delicate frescoes. His work was so authentic that it got him into trouble.
"I told the judge who sentenced me, 'You're condemning the fact that I'm good,'" he said. Since then, he has signed each piece he makes and accompanied it with a certificate attesting that it is "inspired by the Etruscan world and made with the same technique."
The certificate also notes, in capital letters, that the piece is "no part of the archaeological patrimony."
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
