Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad Trains African Experts to Fight Looting

Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad began training heritage professionals from nine African countries on October 5, in a first-of-its-kind course on combating antiquities trafficking. Italy's National School of Heritage and Cultural Activities (SNPAC) runs the program with the École du Patrimoine Africain (EPA) in Porto-Novo, Benin, under a three-year agreement covering training and research in heritage and museum management.

The Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage — informally known as the Art Squad — claims to have recovered over 3 million cultural items and seized more than 1 million forged artworks since its founding in 1969. Its only real rival of late is the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, with which the Art Squad frequently collaborates.

Participants come from Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Morocco, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia. That is a wide slice of the continent, and a pointed one: several of these countries have lost significant heritage to the illicit market.

What does the course cover?

The curriculum is practical rather than ceremonial. Topics include:

• Tools and methodologies for collection documentation
• Provenance research (tracing an object's ownership history)
• Digitization of collections
• International cooperation mechanisms
• Techniques for tracing cultural heritage objects

The program sits under Italy's Mattei Plan for Africa, a cooperation and sustainable-development initiative introduced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in 2024.

What are the officials saying?

"The fight against the illicit trafficking of cultural property is a shared responsibility, which requires specialist expertise and collaboration between institutions," Culture Minister Alessandro Guili said in a statement reported by Il Sole 24 Ore. "With this agreement, the National School of Heritage and Cultural Activities consolidates its role in training and international cooperation, bringing together Italian and African professionals."

Guili framed the effort as a two-way street. "As part of the Mattei Plan, we are promoting a partnership based on reciprocity, the exchange of knowledge and respect for cultural identities," he said. "Protecting the artifacts of history means safeguarding communities' memories and their right to pass them on to future generations."

EPA director Franck Ogou took the longer view. He called the course "proof that Italia and the École du Patrimoine Africain are rekindling their long-standing friendship, which has been consolidated since the very beginning of the EPA's venture in Africa."

"Italia is thus demonstrating its commitment to collaborating with Africa, and the École du Patrimoine Africain serves as the conduit for this," Ogou said. "All that remains is for us to look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration."

Diplomatic warmth aside, the substance is real. Italy brings more than five decades of forensic experience in recovering looted art, and the African institutions get tools to document and trace collections before objects vanish into private collections abroad. If the three-year agreement holds, the October 5 launch may be remembered as the point where recovery expertise stopped flowing one way.