FBI Boston recovers 17th-century urn, returns it to Rome — Federal Bureau Of Investigation
The federal bureau of investigation’s Boston office recovered a stolen 17th-century Italian reliquary urn and returned it to Rome on Wednesday. The gilded wooden urn had been voluntarily relinquished to federal agents on Feb. 11 by a Northeast antiques dealer.
Ted E. Docks, the FBI special agent in charge of the Boston field office, said, “It’s incredibly exciting when the FBI can recover a piece of history that carries such deep emotional and cultural significance.” He also called the urn “a tangible link to intense religious devotion and a connection to the generations who lived and prayed with it.”
Ted E. Docks on the urn
Docks said the object “represents the intersection of faith, history, and art — elements that are invaluable to the people of Italy and to humanity as a whole.” The urn was one of 17 artifacts stolen from the Church of San Michele Arcangelo di Cangiano between 2012 and 2022, and it is protected by the Italian government and listed in the Italian Dioceses’ inventory of Historical Artistic Heritage Items.
Boston and Rome cooperation
FBI Boston started investigating the urn’s location in fall 2025 and worked with the FBI’s art crime team, the FBI’s office in Rome, and the Italian Carabinieri. The dealer said to have held the urn had bought it from an antiques dealer in Italy, a detail that gave investigators a path from the Northeast back to an item already tied to a documented theft abroad.
The art crime team returned the reliquary to the Italian Republic in a formal repatriation ceremony. For U.S. investigators, the case ended with the artifact leaving federal custody; for the Italian side, it restored one protected item to the country’s historical-artistic inventory after years outside it.
Italian Republic repatriation
The handover on Wednesday closes the immediate recovery effort and shows how a single object can move from a private antiques chain back into state custody through coordinated law enforcement work. The next step is simple for everyone watching the record of the theft: the urn is back in Rome, and the paper trail around it now sits with the institutions that protect it.
