Out of the grasp of looters, a Roman soldier shares a shed with other statues removed from display in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens. Since 1970 thieves have pilfered some 523,000 treasures in Italy. Trained “art police” have recovered about a third.

The villa was originally a simple vineyard, which was purchased by the Borghese family in 1580. In the early 1600s Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, Pope Paul V's nephew, purchased surrounding lands. He began an ambitious building process that converted the simple vineyard into a sprawling, 200-acre (80-hectare) estate with a dozen buildings surrounded by gardens replete with statues and fountains.

—Text adapted from "Italy's Endangered Art," National Geographic magazine, August 1999