What's the old saying, "One museum's reluctantly returned stolen artifacts is another museum's greatest economic boom?" Maybe that's not it, but that's really not very important, who said what. The important thing is that all that bundle of antiquities that the Getty, the Met, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Princeton University Museum of Art had lining their shelves, is now, after a decade of legal wrangling, back in Italian museums. And it's expected to create huge piles of money at the Quirinale Palace in Rome, where sixty-eight of the lifted objects are now in an exhibit, "Nostoi: Returned Masterpieces," that was just unveiled this week. Here's a bit about why it's such a big deal:

For many Italians, the exhibit will be the first opportunity to see objects that have been the subject of legal battles and international press reports for years. The dispute over the Euphronios krater, for example, began shortly after the Met purchased it for $1 million in 1972.

The objects were returned after Italian investigators spent a decade uncovering evidence they had been looted from tombs and ruins, smuggled out of the country and trafficked by a network of dealers. The museums that purchased them have said they were unaware of their illicit origins.