Your first book is by a journalist who has done undercover investigation into art crime.

Yes. In recent years there have been a number of undercover investigative journalists who have been involved in major recoveries of stolen works of art, in particular the journalist Peter Watson. For several decades Watson has done absolutely incredible work where he goes undercover, along with the police, to try to make headway with unsolved crimes. This began back in the 1980s when he worked with Rodolfo Siviero, a star of the Carabinieri art squad, when he went undercover to try to recover the so-called “Palermo Nativity”, the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence by Caravaggio, which was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. The theft prompted the establishment of the world’s first art police, the Carabinieri art squad. Watson wrote a book about that called The Caravaggio Conspiracy. And then more recently he has written, with co-author Cecilia Todeschini, another book called The Medici Conspiracy, which is an in-depth, very thoroughly researched investigation of the theft, looting and smuggling of antiquities by a chap called Giacomo Medici.

What does The Medici Conspiracy reveal about the nature of the criminal organisations of the time?

Since the 1960s most art crime has fallen under the auspices of organised crime groups. This ranges from small local gangs to large international mafias. Peter Watson’s investigation of the 1969 theft of the Palermo Nativity revealed that it was stolen by members of Cosa Nostra. And then we fast-forward to the crimes of Giacomo Medici, who could be said to have been running his own small organised crime syndicate. He was the mastermind behind a large group of tomb raiders, or tombaroli as they call them in Italy, that was stealing primarily from Cerveteri, which is an Etruscan necropolis just outside Rome. Important artefacts, which had never been seen by archaeologists, were dug up by looters and smuggled to the free port in Geneva where they would sit in a warehouse. Giacomo Medici would take Polaroid photos of them and he would show the photos, not only to art dealers, but also to the heads of major museums around the world including the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York] and the [J Paul] Getty. And the problem was that some of these major curators, including, most famously, Marion True, whose trial ended in Rome last year, knowingly purchased looted antiquities through Giacomo Medici. They didn’t sufficiently check the provenance. They looked at works that were so fantastic they seemed too good to be true and they took the word of a dealer.

Medici was really providing the cream of antiquities coming out of Italy during the second half of the 20th century. He was eventually caught in 1997 and then imprisoned in 2004. The Medici Conspiracy tells the story of this fascinating and charismatic figure in incredible detail. The scholarship is meticulous because the authors knew that they would be making serious waves in the art world, so there was the potential danger of lawsuits on the part of those mentioned in the book.

In a way, this kind of theft is a latter-day colonialism, isn’t it, with the treasures of Europe being exported to the new empire of America? But while the world of international crime has become very sophisticated in the last few decades, it has a long history. Ever since ancient times, looting has accompanied military conquest. Rome itself displayed booty from its Eastern campaigns, a tradition emulated by Napoleon. But there has surely never been such systematic looting on such a grand scale as during World War II, and I think you’ve chosen a book that reflects that?

Absolutely. The history of art looting in war is very long. When I teach the history of art crime, I actually begin with 212 BC, which is when the Roman Republic sacked the Greek settlement of Syracuse in Sicily. This marked the beginning of the Roman love affair with all things Hellenistic. The result was that the Roman army would actually divert from the strategic routes to try to seize more art. From then on really all the major military campaigns in the following centuries involved art – the Fourth Crusade, of course, the Napoleonic campaigns… And then we get to World War II.

The second book I’ve chosen is Florentine Art Under Fire by Frederick Hartt, which I believe is still out of print, unfortunately. Hartt wrote six or so seminal textbooks that are read by literally thousands of undergraduate students all around the world. They led me to Florentine Art Under Fire, which is Hartt’s memoir of his time as an officer working for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission during World War II. These officers were assigned to protect the art of Florence and the area around it from war damage, and Hartt’s book is a very dramatic and heart-wrenching account of his activities in Florence as the Allies were moving in. They were one side of the Arno river and the Nazis were on the other side. The Nazis had laid mines around Florence and there was a danger they were going to blow up most of the city as they retreated. There was some very serious fighting right in the centre of the city and the major loss was the Ponte Santa Trinita, a 16th century bridge designed by Bartolomeo Ammanati that many people consider far more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio. The Germans blew it up. They also destroyed a section of the city just across from the Ponte Vecchio in order to try to block the bridge with debris. They were not allowed to damage the Ponte Vecchio, though, because it was one of Hitler’s favourite works.

Other than the Ponte Santa Trinita, what else was lost?

There were literally hundreds of objects that went missing during the Occupation. There was a systematic looting of works, for example from the Uffizi Gallery, which the Nazis stripped. The works were later found in an abandoned jail in northern Italy. There are certainly some works that were completely lost but there are no seminal works that come to mind. It’s more the destruction of a neighbourhood; the willingness to blow up a city of such historical import. Thankfully some of the churches and palaces in the neighbourhood that was blown up by the Germans survived. It’s quite astonishing that they did. They were really built to last. Also the idea was to create rubble in the streets to block pathways, not to proactively damage monuments. There was this strange juxtaposition between the willingness to blow up a city of such historical import and the fact that the Germans would not touch something like the Ponte Vecchio. Hitler had a passionate relationship with art and architecture having wanted to be an architect or an artist in his youth. He sanctioned incredible destruction and yet he wanted to preserve individual titbits that stood out to him. This is dealt with in other books by Frederick Hartt – the expropriation of antiquities and art by the Third Reich.