Officials in New York have returned the disembodied head of Dionysus, god of wine and revelry, to Italy, 23 years after the deity was rudely dismembered by thieves. (Okay, it was actually a statue of Dionysus.) Following its severing, the head “was acquired sometime before 1990 by a Japanese museum that went out of business several years afterward…
The head then appeared in the Christie’s catalog,” and was withdrawn when the auction house received information that it might be stolen goods. The NYPD got involved, and eventually linked the head to a list of missing Roman antiquities.
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