... appears to be the Cleveland Museum of Art ... from the Plain Dealer:

The Cleveland Museum of Art is next on the list of American museums from which Italy will seek the return of ancient treasures it says were looted from Italian soil.

Maurizio Fiorilli, the Italian government lawyer leading negotiations with American museums, confirmed Friday that he has been trying to open discussions with the Cleveland museum as part of an international campaign to halt the trade in illegally excavated antiquities.

He said three e-mails to the museum have gone unanswered, although he acknowledged that the e-mails may not have been addressed properly and may be missing.

In the latest message, sent Dec. 20, Fiorilli said he proposed that the museum send representatives to Rome in February for a discussion about how the Cleveland museum could return ancient works in exchange for long-term loans from Italian museums.

"We are available to sit around a table to examine in complete serenity the basis of our requests," Fiorilli said Friday, speaking by phone from his office in Rome.

Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland Mu seum of Art, was in New York on Friday and could not be reached for comment.

As recently as Tuesday, how ever, Rub said that he had received no communications from Italy regarding works in the museum's collection. In recent months, he has said that the museum is willing to speak with Italian officials once official contact is made.

Italian authorities say evidence unearthed in a police raid on a warehouse in Switzerland in 1995 exposed direct links between tombaroli -- tomb robbers -- and art dealers who then restored the works and later sold them. The authorities say the dealers provided each work with a fake ownership history, or provenance, to cover up its origin.

American museums check with agencies that monitor art thefts, such as the International Foundation for Art Research, before buying such works to see if they were stolen. But because no prior records exist for looted works, it is impossible to know their exact origins. Museums say that in such cases, it is better to buy and exhibit antiquities than to pass them up.

Over the past year, however, Italy has used public pressure and evidence from the raid in Switzerland and other investigations to persuade the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to return dozens of ancient treasures.

"We offer loans of long duration for those who return objects we seek, and there is no damage to culture or to the museums," Fiorilli said. "Our goal is to sever clandestine excavations and illegal international traffic in antiquities from Italy."

Fiorilli declined to specify which works Italy wants returned from the Cleveland museum's permanent collection, saying that it was a matter of delicacy and that he wanted to preserve space for negotiation.

"It's not great numbers," he said.

Evidence from the 1995 police raid is at the core of Italy's criminal trial against Marion True, a former curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and Robert Hecht, an art dealer based in Paris and New York.

Attorneys for both have said their clients are not guilty of any crime.

The Cleveland museum bought eight works from Hecht between 1951 and 1990, although it is not known whether those are the specific objects that will be sought by Italy.

"We know that we can't take all of the collection," Fiorilli said.

"We are interested in working on this side by side."

Folks wanting to engage in speculation, can check out this item from back in October ... and, of course, the Cleveland Apollo is still 'up in the air' provenance-wise