Art: On the Road to Rome

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On one of the three main roads to Rome last week two Italian Army trucks rolled south. They had come from Munich, with $10 million worth of art under their tarpaulins. At the Ducal Palace in the mountain city of Bolzano, the trucks halted and weary armed guards began unloading the crates. They would be safe there until a show to celebrate their return could be arranged at Rome.

After almost four years of hoping, Italy was at last getting back its looted art, mostly from an Austrian salt mine where the Nazis had hidden it. The rescued treasures included such famed paintings as Bruegel's Blind Leading the Blind, Titian's Danae, Joos van Cleve's Adoration of the Magi, Palma Vecchio's Sacra Conversazione, Tiepolo's Neptune Offering Gifts to Venice.

Most of the paintings had originally hung in the Naples Museum, and would eventually return there. Early in the war, the Neapolitan curators stored their collection at Monte Cassino, which then seemed safe from Allied bombs. Just before the ancient Benedictine monastery was bombed to rubble, German commanders ordered the art shipped to Rome. But one freightcarful rumbled right through to Berlin; some of the boys in the Hermann Goring Division figured it would make a nice birthday present for the boss.

Goring's art expert, a Berlin dealer named Walter Andreas Hofer, stored the offering in the salt mine where the Allies found it. They found Hofer too, and clapped him in jail. For most of the first year of the occupation, Hofer spent his nights in the clink and his days in a Munich art dump, identifying loot. Hofer's filing-cabinet memory for paintings, and his willingness to remember, helped win freedom for him and restitution for Italy.