Poor Ariadne, wife of Bacchus, has been lying asleep in a warehouse in Long Island City for a long time.
The marble statue of the reclining woman has likely served as the lid on an 1,800-year-old  sarcophagus of a Roman noblewoman, but it was reported to federal investigators and found overseas last february. Now may people hope it could be returned to Italy.

The work mysteriously disappeared in 1983, after Gianfranco Bacchina, an Italian art dealer, took it to Switzerland to show it in a few exhibitions.
In 2002, when he was accused of trafficking in plundered Roman artifacts, photographs of Ariadne were found in his gallery, but no-one knew anything about it until 2013, when it was exhibited for sale at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan by Phoenix Ancient Art.

What is hardest to explain is how a 1,700 pound sculpture went unnoticed so easily. In a recent article, lawyer Donatella Sicomo, en expert of trials related to illegal traffics, tries to retrace the route of Italian works of art headed abroad. After being accurately altered by expert restorers - a procedure that is essential to prevent them from being recognized - the artifacts usually reach Britain through Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Once in the UK they are sent in the rest of the world with false certificates and put on the market, sometimes in good faith, by local art dealers or auction houses.