Euphronios Krater - Article by Elisabetta Povoledo

As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.

The Euphronios krater, returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum, was unveiled on Friday.

When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for information on its provenance.

This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one of 21 treasures turned over by the Met under the terms of a pathbreaking 2006 accord.

As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the state attorney’s office, Italy’s culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from Homer’s “Iliad” illustrated on the vase’s main panel. The Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received in the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) bear him home.

The event was held at the attorney’s office to underscore the persistence of the Italian lawyers who have lobbied for the return of antiquities from American museums, dealers and private collectors over the last three years.

“In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate something positive,” said Italy’s attorney general, Oscar Fiumara. (The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this week: the justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an appearance at Rome’s main university; and Naples is submerged in trash.)

In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in Los Angeles, Boston and Princeton, N.J., and with the private collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this week transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with other institutions in the United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr. Rutelli said on Friday.

But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special place, symbolizing the war against clandestine tomb-robbing and illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony. So the general mood was victorious.

“The Italian state has won,” said Rocco Buttiglione, the former culture minister who initiated the talks with the Met just over two years ago and took part in the ceremony. “This is a success story.”