Ex Mob HQ houses old masters exhibit

(ANSA) - Casal Di Principe, June 19 - As many as 20 masterpieces by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Italian baroque 17th-century painter Mattia Preti have been loaned to a new museum in a villa formerly used by a Neapolitan crime boss as his headquarters, curators say.
    Famous museums from across Italy ranging from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to the Capodimonte in Naples have loaned precious works for the exhibit that will be on show from Monday until October 21 at the confiscated villa in the town of Casal Di Principe near Caserta province from where the mobster Egidio 'Brutus' Coppola issued orders for a rash of murders to gangsters belonging to the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, the Naples version of Cosa Nostra.
    Alessandro de Lisi, director of the new museum, called it "a radical project without mediation," meaning that the exhibit was launched with private sponsorship.
    Among the works on display next week are Preti's dazzling painting 'Vanity,' Warhol's 'Fate Presto,' and, from the Uffizi, feminist icon painter Artemisia Gentileschi's St. Catherine.
    Culture Minister Enrico Franceschini pledged that the exhibit in the traditional heartland of the Casalesi gang described by Roberto Saviano in Gomorra is only a first step.
    "This will not be all, this place will stay open: we are by your side," the minister told Mayor Renato Natale.