14 DAY TRIAL // In Italy, all the ancient artifacts found are considered the property of the state and should be reported to the authorities. The law forbids selling such items and the sentences are quite harsh. Yet, that's exactly what a farmer in the southern part of the country did. As he was carrying his works, he came upon a hoard of old items belonging to a 2,600-year-old sanctuary, some of which he took home and tried to sell. The hundreds of items were seized by the art division of the Carabinieri and the man was placed under investigation.
The discovery was made by a small lake, just outside of the town of Aprilia, about 25 miles (40 km) south of the modern capital city of Rome. A team of archaeologists will continue the dig works professionally in order to get more insight on the finding, which is believed to be a sanctuary from the 7th or 6th century BC. Stefano De Caro, the Italian Culture Ministry's director of archeology, thinks the pottery, part of which seems to have been brought from Greece, was a gift to a local deity, probably associated with the lake.
"These were poor people, they gave thanks for a good harvest or they prayed that there wouldn't be a drought," explained De Caro for the Associated Press, as cited by MSNBC. "At the time there were no aqueducts, so the lake meant life." The specialist estimates that this hoard of delicate pottery would have brought the farmer several hundreds of thousands of Euros on the black market.
The Carabinieri paramilitary police descended into the man's house after observing some bits of pottery in the soil he dug, and they confiscated over 500 items, such as cups, consecrated vases and perfume vials. The experts hope that these artifacts will shed more light on the activity in the region during the period before the Roman rule, when people who spoke Latin called it their home. They were under the influence of the Etruscans, a civilization that controlled the central parts of Italy.