The 2,500-year-old section of marble was presented to the Greek government by Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, as a gesture of goodwill between the two Mediterranean countries.

The 14-by-13-inch artifact consists of a foot and part of a dress hem from a sculpture of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

It originally stood above the entrance to the Parthenon as part of a 520-foot-long frieze that ran around the temple and featured other gods such as Poseidon, Apollo and Artemis.

It was among the marble pieces stripped from the Temple of Athena in the early 19th century.

A large proportion was taken by Lord Elgin, the then British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, of which Greece was a part.

His collection ended up in the British Museum, where it remains today.

The fragment handed over by Italy on Tuesday was acquired by a museum in Palermo, Sicily, later in the 19th century.

Greece's president, Karolos Papoulias, thanked President Napolitano for the return of the piece, which will stay in Athens on permanent loan.

"As you know, Greece is seeking the return of the Parthenon marbles (from the British Museum), so you are aware of the importance and the symbolism of this gesture," Mr Papoulias said. "This gesture is especially appreciated."

Greece hopes the return of the fragment will be the first step in having all the marbles returned to Athens, a demand it has been making for decades.

"When we opened the crate, the marble just shone ... like a gem," said Vivi Vassilopoulou, a senior archeologist from the Greek culture ministry.

Greek culture minister Michalis Liapis said the return of the segment was a boost to the country's campaign to reunite all the Parthenon sculptures at a new museum at the foot of the Acropolis, due to open early next year.

"The positive responses we received in our international efforts encourage us to continue until we have achieved our target," he said.

The British Museum insists that it legally acquired the marbles because Lord Elgin acted with the full knowledge and permission of the Ottoman authorities.

"(Our) position regarding the sculptures remains unchanged. Here in London the sculptures are an important part of a world collection which is free to all and which allows six million visitors a year to explore the complex network of interconnected world cultures," said museum spokeswoman Hannah Boulton.

The piece from Palermo is the second remnant of the marbles to be returned to Greece: the University of Heidelberg in Germany sent back a tiny fragment two years ago.

One of The Vatican's museums will next month return two fragments from the Parthenon, an Italian official said.

"I hope this will at least open the way (for the return of the Elgin Marbles)," said archaeologist Louis Godart, President Napolitano's cultural adviser.

The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BC in honour of Athena and was decorated with hundreds of sculpted figures of gods and participants in a religious procession.

When Athens was under siege by the Venetians in 1687, the Parthenon was used as a gunpowder store and a massive explosion blew off the roof, destroying a large portion of the sculptures.

The Venetians began the plunder that was continued by later visitors, including Lord Elgin.

About half of the surviving works are now at the British Museum, while museums in France, Germany, Austria and Denmark also own small fragments.

Greece welcomed home a small fragment of the Parthenon marbles on Wednesday and expressed hope the gesture by the Italian government would prompt Britain to return its own prized collection of Greek sculpture.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano presented Greek authorities with the small piece of broken sculpture, removed from a frieze decorating the ancient Parthenon temple by British diplomat Lord Elgin at the start of the 19th century.

"This is the first step toward healing the wound left on the holy temple by the removal of the Parthenon marbles," Greek President Karolos Papoulias told a news conference in the New Acropolis museum, built to house the marbles.

The fragment, depicting the robe and right foot of the hunting goddess Artemis, has spent two centuries in a museum in Sicily after Elgin gave it to the British consul-general there on his way back to London.

It returned from Italy after 13 years of delicate negotiations by the Greek government, which has long called on Britain to give back scores of priceless ancient sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles taken from the hill-top Acropolis.

The bankrupt Scottish Lord Elgin sold the treasures in 1816 to the British Museum, which still contains roughly half of the 160 meter (yard) frieze which adorned the 2,500-year-old temple.

To applause and cries of "bravo," Napolitano helped to fit the fragment, measuring 35 by 34 centimeters (14 by 13 inches), into a reconstruction of the frieze on the museum's glass-fronted upper hall, parallel to the Parthenon.

Expected to be open to the public next year, the museum was built at the foot of the Acropolis, under the marble temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, which was completed in 432 BC as the crowning glory of Athens' "Golden Age."

Under Italian law, the fragment will be on loan from Sicily's Antonio Salinas museum, but officials said the deal was permanent. Italian officials also said the Vatican museum had agreed to return two pieces from the Parthenon later this year.

"Greece and Italy are often characterized as open-air museums and welcome every year millions of visitors ... For these reasons we cannot accept smuggling of artifacts from their homeland," Napolitano said before inaugurating an exhibit of 74 stolen antiquities recovered by Greece and Italy.

Most of the artifacts in the exhibition came from illegal excavations in Italy and were discovered in museums and private collections in the United States.

The British Museum has refused to return the treasures, which it says were acquired by Elgin under a contract with the Ottoman empire that then ruled Greece.

The Culture Ministry of Greece will be organising the "Nostoi" exhibition at the New Acropolis Museum in the framework of the Italian President's visit to Athens.

The exhibition includes the "Nostoi Capolavori Ritrovati" exhibition which was organised by the Presidency of the Italian Republic and was initially presented in Rome (Palazzo del Quirinale, December 2, 2007-March 30, 2008) and then at the Palazzo Poli a Fontana di Trevi and focused on 74 repatriated antiquities from various Museums in the United States.

The exhibition will provide the public with the first taste of the joint effort between Italy and Greece on cracking down on the illegal trafficking of their cultural goods.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a detailed scientific catalogue in both the Greek and English language.

The inauguration will be taking place on Wednesday, September 24, at 10:30 a.m.

Hungary has offered to return a collection of antiquities on display in a leading Budapest museum that were illegally exported from Greece, the Hungarian foreign minister said Thursday.

Kinga Goncz said Greek and Hungarian experts would meet to study the 22 pieces and discuss which would be repatriated.

"We are ready to return these artifacts," she said.

The Hungarian offer comes as Athens has stepped up its campaign to reclaim looted antiquities from museums and private collections worldwide.

Goncz said the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest bought the pieces several years ago from a private owner.

"It turned out in the last few months that some of them are for sure from excavations, from Greece, and ... were illegally brought to Hungary," she said, without elaborating.

Goncz was speaking after talks in Athens with Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis.

Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis said the Hungarian government's decision to launch talks on the artifacts return set "an example for the international community."

"The return of antiquities ... tops the culture ministry's agenda," Liapis said.

Last week, a broken marble sculpture and a bronze vase dating to the 4th century B.C. were repatriated from the U.S. following a deal between the Greek government and collector Shelby White. Greece was able to prove that the pieces were illegally exported from the country, but conceded that White, a New York philanthropist, bought them "in good faith" and would face no legal action.

Other recently returned works include sculptures and a gold wreath from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Later this month, Athens will host an exhibition of looted antiquities recently returned to Greece and Italy, which has also mounted an aggressive bid to reclaim stolen artifacts.

The works will be shown at the landmark new Acropolis Museum, where Greek officials hope one day to display the Elgin Marbles — a collection of 2,500 year old sculptures from the ancient Parthenon temple that are now in the British Museum.

The London museum has repeatedly refused to hand back the marble pieces, which were removed from the Parthenon 200 years ago by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin.

Greece celebrated on Wednesday the return of two rare smuggled antiquities from a prominent U.S. collector and expressed hope other ancient Greek treasures housed overseas would one day be sent home.

A fourth century B.C. bronze vase and the upper part of a marble tombstone were returned by U.S. collector Shelby White in August, a year after the Culture Ministry started lobbying to get them back on evidence they had been smuggled out of Greece.

The lower part of the broken tombstone, depicting a young man and a warrior, was found in Greece during a 1960s excavation. The fragments, which archaeologists feared would never be reunited, can now be exhibited for the first time as a whole.

"Fortunately, the archaeologists' prediction was wrong. I feel privileged as the culture minister to share the scientists' joy," Culture Minister Michalis Liapis told reporters at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. "I'm sure we will see such events more often in the future."

In the past two years, the Greek ministry has launched a hunt for thousands of ancient artifacts smuggled out of the country. Many museums around the world have started returning smuggled objects to their countries of origin.

In 2007, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California agreed to return 40 items to Italy after Rome launched a court case alleging that they had been smuggled out of the country. The museum has returned several such items to Greece.

"Fighting antiquities smuggling is the result of governments' cooperation internationally," Liapis said. "We sign agreements, we unite our powers in the war against this criminal activity."

Greece has waged a long-running battle for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, removed from the Athens Acropolis 200 years ago by British diplomat Lord Elgin and currently housed in the British Museum in London.

The museum refuses to return them to Greece on the ground that its statutes do not allow it to do so.

"This event certainly gives us hopes for the return of the Parthenon marbles," Liapis told Reuters.

The new Acropolis Museum may prove to be the most lavishly appointed white elephant in history. Nothing will change the view of the British Government that the intended centrepiece, the magnificently sculpted Elgin Marbles, must remain permanently in the British Museum.

Not that the museum will be empty. There will be 4,000 exhibits including the remaining Parthenon sculptures. But the crown jewels, the 247ft of the original 524ft frieze, 15 of 92 metopes and 17 figures from the pediments, all dating to the 5th century BC, will remain 1,500 miles away in London.

Britain has long argued that when the Earl of Elgin took the Marbles between 1801 and 1805, he was acting legally and that, had he not done so, they would have suffered further deterioration. The Parthenon was already a ruin. Also, fearing their destruction in the conflict between the Greeks and the Turks, Elgin got permission from the Turks, whose empire then ruled Greece, to remove the antiquities.

But the British Museum's ownership of the sculptures has been called into question by a challenge to the validity of a crucial 19th-century legal document. A specialist in Ottoman law says that without the signature and seal of the Sultan as supreme head of the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin had no legal right to remove the ancient sculptures from the Acropolis.

Professor Vassilis Dimitriadis, of the University of Crete, says that the document of 1801 — an Italian translation of an Ottoman firman or licence which the British Museum acquired two years ago as the only legal evidence of ownership — is invalidated by vital missing elements. More here.

The British Museum argues that the translated document is from a lost original firman in which the Sultan's acting grand vizier was authorised to permit Elgin to acquire the sculptures.

Professor Dimitriadis claims that the original was not a firman because only the Sultan could issue one by Ottoman law, that it lacks the Sultan's emblem (a tougras), and an invocation to God (da'vet tahmid).

More on this topic also here. (18 July 2000)