Who owns the past? Politics and law in the restitution of cultural property

The article examines the issue of cultural property restitution as a boundary field between law, politics, and ethics, exploring the legal and symbolic significance of returning works of art to their places, States, or communities of origin. Through a broad survey of historical and contemporary cases—from wartime spoliations to illicit trafficking, from post-colonial restitutions to those linked to Nazi-Fascist persecutions—the Author highlights the different causes, modalities, and rationales of restitution, emphasizing the plurality of actors and instruments involved. The contribution reconstructs the role of both international and domestic law, underscoring their structural limits, in particular non-retroactivity and the inalienability of public cultural property, and shows how restitutions are often grounded in negotiated agreements and forms of soft law rather than in judicial decisions. In conclusion, the article argues that a new ethic of cultural responsibility and an emerging international custom are taking shape, pointing toward the possible affirmation of a “right to restitution,” also understood as a response to a fundamental question in cultural heritage studies: who owns the past?