> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Manhattan District Attorney's Office Returns 17 Items to Italy and the Vatican
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/prokuratura-mankhettena-vernula-italii-i-vatikanu-17-predmetov/
- Published: 2026-03-27T06:35:37.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:28.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Heritage, New York

On 26 March 2026 a ceremony was held for the handover of 17 stolen antiquities and rare books with a combined value of more than $1.5 million. The items were seized in the course of an investigation into a network of illicit antiquities trafficking.

Among the items returned were six rare books in Chinese, scholarly treatises written by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries. The books were stolen from the archive of the Society of Jesus in the Vatican between 1999 and 2002, surfaced on the antiquarian market in London in 2000, were then bought by a private collector and donated to the University of Notre Dame, where they were seized in late 2025\. Their history is a curious one: from the end of the 16th century the Jesuits translated Western treatises on astronomy, mathematics and cartography into Chinese for the educated Confucian elite.

Among the other items returned are a letter of 1525 from Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, to the poet Ariosto, seized from the Morgan Library, as well as two ancient Greek ceramic cups of around 500 BC from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since its founding in 2017, the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit has secured convictions against 18 people, seized more than 6,200 items worth over $485 million, and returned more than 5,860 of them to 36 countries.