On June 24, 2026, Italy advanced a significant legislative milestone in the Italian parliament that would – for the first time – establish a formal restitution process for Holocaust-era looted art and cultural property. The Chamber of Deputies’ VII Committee on Culture, Science, and Education reviewed the Bill C. 2834.
The draft bill, which was introduced by Representative Federico Mollicone, would empower the Italian Government to create a restitution process for cultural property and artworks seized, looted, or lost through forced sales due to antisemitic racial persecution addressing both the persecution under Italian Fascist racial laws beginning in 1938, and the broader Holocaust-era period between 1933 and 1945.
In March 2024, WJRO and the Claims Conference released a global progress report, Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Property: A Current Worldwide Overview, finding that Italy had made only “some progress” over the past 25 years. Unlike neighboring countries, Italy had not yet established a clear procedure for restitution despite having endorsed the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art and the 2009 Terezin Declaration.
Bill 2834 directly addresses the gaps identified in the global progress report and incorporates elements of the Best Practices by establishing two critical pillars: creating an independent committee with binding restitution authority, and, in relation to art looted from persecuted communities between 1933 and 1945 only, disapplying national limitation rules, the principle of inalienability of State property and national asset protections, thus allowing the return of looted art free from the legal hurdles traditionally standing in the way of restitution, especially of property in Italian public collections.
A link to the June 24 hearing in Italian (video and written statements) is available here.
Comments on the proposed Italian legislation are available from Lorenzo Casini, Giuseppe Calabi, and Katharina Hüls-Valenti.
REPORT
Professor Casini’s comprehensive country report, “La restituzione di opere d’arte sottratte per ragioni di persecuzione razziale nel periodo 1933-1945: I beni custoditi nelle collezioni pubbliche italiane” (The Restitution of Artworks Looted for Reasons of Racial Persecution in the Period 1933-1945: Items Held in Italian Public Collections), jointly prepared by the IMT Lucca School for Advanced Studies, the Claims Conference, and the WJRO, was formally submitted to the parliamentary record as part of the official testimony.
The report details Italy’s legal framework, the specifics of this legislative effort, and how it compares to established restitution models in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and the United Kingdom. In preparing the report, Professor Lorenzo Casini (Rector and Professor of Administrative Law and Cultural Heritage Law, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and former Co-President of the International Society of Public Law) was assisted by Dr. Wesley Fisher, (Director of Research at the WJRO-Claims Conference), Giuseppe Calabi (art and cultural heritage lawyer, member of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s committee for reviewing the international circulation legal framework), Pierre Valentin (art and cultural heritage lawyer), Dr. Katharina Hüls-Valenti (provenance researcher), Dr. Bianca Gaudenzi (Assistant professor, University of Florence, and Bye-Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) and Dr. Sharon Hecker (Contract Professor, Università degli Studi di Milano and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano).
For the original country report in Italian, please click here.
For an English translation, please click here.
last updated July 1, 2026