AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
ITALY---
A church in southern Italy dismantled by an artist who planned to rebuild it at New York's Museum of Modern Art is being returned to its original site, Italian police said Saturday.
Italian artist
Francesco Vezzoli last year carefully took apart and wrapped up the pretty church in the small village of Montegiordano in Calabria, built at the end of the 19th century and later desecrated -- much to the horror of local inhabitants, who said it was national heritage.
Their protests sparked an investigation by the local cultural superintendent in Cosenza and the shipment out of Italy was blocked in October, with police seizing the huge crates of stones in a hangar in the local port. The church had originally been expected to figure in the heart of one of the world's top contemporary art museums, the MoMA PS1 in the Long Island City neighbourhood of New York. [
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