The illicit antiquities trade and clandestine excavations in Italy came under intense scrutiny for an almost 30-year period in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Perhaps the most notorious “hot pot”, to use the phrase coined by Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time, is the Euphronios Krater, Said to have been looted from the cemetery of Cerveteri by ‘tombaroli’ (tomb-robbers) in 1971, it is was then sold by Giacomo Medici to the deale