Italy on Tuesday signed a deal with Princeton University to return looted artefacts - its latest coup in a battle against antiquities smuggling.
In the fourth such deal with a major US museum in the last two years, Italy will regain eight Etruscan and Greek pieces from Princeton's collections in exchange for loans of equal value and greater cooperation on exhibits and digs.
Four Etruscan drinking cups or jugs will return within 60 days while Princeton will hold onto the other four pieces - including two vases attributed to Greek masters - until 2011.
Seven other disputed works will not be returning to Italy.
Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said the deal was "a precious piece in the jigsaw of cultural diplomacy undertaken by the Italian government, which joins the positive results obtained with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles".
Those three deals have seen acclaimed vases, silverware and frescos, as well as a famed Getty statue of Aphrodite, return to Italian ownership since early last year.
Italy has been cracking down on tomb raiders and aggressively pursuing looted objects.
In the first case of its kind, Rome is trying two Americans, former Getty curator Marion True and antiquities dealer Robert Hecht, for knowingly acquiring smuggled artefacts. Both deny wrongdoing.
One of the Princeton objects set to return in four years' time, a wine-cooling Greek vase attributed to 500 BC Athenian red-figure master painter Kleophrades, was sold to Princeton by Hecht.
Italian police say that, like many objects, it was looted from the Etruscan site of Cerveteri north of Rome.
The other three Princeton works set to return in 2011 are an Etruscan lion's head sculpture and two Greek vases from ancient Apulia, now Puglia, made when southern Italy was dominated by Greek colonies.
One of the pair is a 'loutrophoros', or two-handled water pot with elongated neck, attributed to the 4th-century BC Darius Painter.
Like the other objects, it is decorated with mythological figures.
The deal was signed by the head of the art museum at the prestigious New Jersey university, Susan Taylor, and the secretary-general of the Italian cultural ministry.
Taylor has welcomed the accord as enabling it "to retain a number of objects, repatriate others that belong to Italy, and have unprecedented access, on a long-term loan basis, to additional material".
Italy is continuing its drive to reclaim its looted heritage.
It has approached the Cleveland Museum of Art in America and the New Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and is set to contact the Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan.
"Italy is in the vanguard of the fight against antiquities trafficking, under the banner of an ethical inspiration that has become an unchallenged reference point for cultural institutions around the world," Rutelli said.
