Italy’s parliament is considering legislation to establish the country’s first formal process for returning art and cultural property taken from victims of Holocaust-era racial persecution. The proposal would create a route for claims involving dispossession by Nazi and Italian authorities, while removing legal barriers that currently protect works in museum collections from transfer. It remains under examination by the lower house’s culture committee.

The bill would authorise the government to establish a five-member committee to investigate ownership histories and decide restitution claims covering persecution between 1933 and 1945. The government would have six months after enactment to establish the system, and the committee would be required to rule within 180 days of a claim. Returns could go to original owners or heirs, or to Italy’s wider Jewish community where no living heirs were identified. The intended scope includes both public and private collections.

Federico Mollicone, president of the lower house’s culture commission, introduced the bill in March. He belongs to Brothers of Italy, the party led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and presents the measure as a historical obligation extending beyond ownership disputes to dignity, remembrance and constitutional principles. Brothers of Italy has roots in the post-fascist parties that emerged after the Second World War. Paolo Gnignati, head of legal affairs at the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, supports the initiative, stressing its wider significance alongside the financial and personal consequences for claimants.

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The historical record documents dispossession across many forms of property. A 2001 inquiry led by former government minister Tina Anselmi identified evidence of 7,847 seizure warrants issued up to April 1945. These covered houses, land, businesses, bank deposits, insurance policies, jewellery, paintings and furniture; the figure is not a count of missing artworks. Confiscations and forced sales became increasingly common after Benito Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938, and intensified from 1943 as Italian and occupying German forces arrested and deported Jews to concentration camps.

The scale of the unresolved museum holdings remains uncertain. Katharina Hüls-Valenti, a provenance specialist at Parma University, identifies four publicly known disputed works currently displayed in Italian museums, but suggests the actual number of Holocaust-era seized works held by museums could be closer to dozens. That remains an assessment rather than an established inventory. Experts point to poor cataloguing, limited transparency, insufficient political priority and reluctance to confront Italy’s fascist past as reasons for the delayed response. These gaps also complicate any judgement about how many claims a new system might face.

One dispute concerns Edouard Manet’s Portrait de M. Arnaud à cheval, painted in 1875 and now at Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna. Hüls-Valenti says the family of German painter Max Liebermann sold it under duress in 1935, and that heirs seeking its return encountered museum resistance. The painting entered the museum through a donation in 1958. Curator Paola Zatti disputes the evidence of coercion, saying Liebermann’s wife sold it to a Jewish antiques dealer. She says the museum agreed with a lawyer representing the heirs to display a label explaining its ownership history and the circumstances of its departure from Germany.

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Another case illustrates how claims can reach beyond Italy. Girolamo da Romano’s Cristo portacroce, dating from around 1508-09, was requisitioned in 1941 by France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government from the family of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jewish businessman and collector living in Paris. After an auction sale to a private collector, Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera bought it in 1998. At the heirs’ request, US authorities seized the painting in 2011 while it was on loan to a museum in Florida.

Italy endorsed the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-looted art restitution, but its formal response has lagged behind those of several European countries. France established a restitution and compensation commission in 1999; Britain created its Spoliation Advisory Panel in 2000. The Italian bill would address the rule treating museum holdings as inalienable national heritage by making a final restitution decision automatically remove a work from the public domain. Returned objects would also cease to be covered by heritage-code protections, allowing them to leave Italy permanently. Existing limitation periods would not bar restitution.

Research capacity and funding remain important questions. A review commissioned by the World Jewish Restitution Organisation was written by lawyer Lorenzo Casini with support from six experts, including Hüls-Valenti. Casini argues that greater transparency is essential to identifying affected objects. Addressing the culture commission in June, he backed the bill while recommending an expansion beyond art to manuscripts, books, archives and ceremonial objects. He also urged additional funding for the committee and researchers, making implementation a matter of resources as well as legal authority.

Mollicone says lawmakers will ensure the culture ministry’s forthcoming funding plans include adequate resources for provenance research, archive digitisation and specialist training. He reports broad political agreement and aims to secure passage within the current legislative session. The proposed committee would include a nominee from Italy’s art police and accept claims from legitimate owners, their descendants or heirs, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and individual Jewish communities. Parliamentary review remains the immediate next step; the restitution machinery and its deadlines would follow only if the legislation becomes law.