Italian art police have recovered a reproduction fragment of an ancient Roman city plan that was being used as a doorstop in their latest operation to crack down on the illegal antiquities market.
A total of 618 stolen artefacts were recovered in a series of raids on seven houses in the Rome area as a result of a three-month investigation.
''We were keeping an eye on people we know to be involved in illegal excavations and this in turn led us to the buyers,'' art police operations chief Raffaele Mancino said.
He added that not all the antiquities were being used as ornaments. As well as the doorstop, an ancient funerary vase was found being used as a dish for flower pots and a burial stone was placed between pots of geraniums.
Police estimate that the haul is worth a total of around one million euros.
Although dated to the 18th century, the reproduction fragment is one of the most precious recoveries since it provides a record of a section of the Forma Urbis Romae, a huge marble plan of the city sculpted on the wall of the Temple of Peace that mapped all the city's public monuments, baths and even small private shops under Emperor Septimius Severus (146-211 AD).
It is thought to have been stolen between 1929 and 1998, when it was noticed missing on an inventory taken at a top Roman museum, Palazzo Braschi.
''The fragment of the Forma Urbis is a new piece of the jigsaw that allows us to reconstruct the story of Rome,'' Rome Cultural Heritage Superintendent Eugenio La Rocca said.
The ancient plan was largely destroyed in the Middle Ages and experts have long been trying to piece together the surviving 1,200 fragments - around 10 per cent of the whole.
Italy has recently stepped up its fight against tomb raiding and has forged deals with foreign museums and galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Princeton University and the Boston Museum of Fine Art to return allegedly plundered art.
In the first case of its kind, Rome is also trying former Getty curator Marion True and an American antiquities dealer, Robert Hecht, for knowingly acquiring smuggled artefacts.
