An erotic mosaic stolen from Pompeii by a Nazi captain during World War II was finally returned to the ancient site on Tuesday.
Featuring a man reclining on a couch being attended to by a scantily clad woman, the small mosaic may have decorated a bedroom floor in a Roman villa, the Pompeii Archaeological Park said in a statement.
When Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, its buildings, thousands of inhabitants and this mosaic were buried beneath layers of ash and pumice.
This coating perfectly preserved the city for more than 1,600 years, making it one of the most important archaeological sites in the world as it offers an unprecedented insight into Roman daily life.
For example, despite dating from between the late 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, this mosaic is still brightly colored, with all its tiles still intact.
By World War II, many areas of Pompeii had already been uncovered. This mosaic was stolen by a Wehrmacht captain who oversaw Germany’s military supply chain in Italy during the war, the archaeological park said.
He gave it to an unnamed German citizen whose heirs contacted the Italian police, asking how they could return it, the park added.
A specialist unit of Italy’s police, responsible for protecting the country’s cultural heritage, then investigated the mosaic’s provenance, tentatively tracing it back to the area destroyed by Mount Vesuvius, although certain information about its discovery was missing.
“Every looted artifact that returns is a wound that heals, so we express our gratitude to the Protection Unit for their work. The wound lies not so much in the material value of the work, but in its historical value; a value that is severely compromised by the illicit trafficking of antiquities,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, said in a statement.
“We don’t know the artifact’s exact provenance and likely never will,” he said, adding that the park will conduct further tests to piece together the mosaic’s history as much as possible.
The mosaic will be temporarily displayed at a museum in Pompeii for public viewing.
Erotic art has been discovered in Pompeii before. Archaeologists uncovered a tiny house filled with elaborate — and sometimes racy — frescoes in October 2024; another house covered in raunchy frescoes reopened to the public in January 2023 after being closed for 20 years; while another fresco, depicting an erotic scene from the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, was uncovered in 2018.
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