Italy’s reactions to ISIS’s destructive, attention-grabbing and money-making exploits in the realm of ancient art in Syria, Iraq and Libya, have re-surfaced in an ironic contradiction.

 While a ground-breaking new exhibition of 3D reconstituted ancient works destroyed by the terrorist group has been inaugurated at the Colosseum, the Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano confirmed that ISIS is smuggling their booty of ancient art, pillaged from Africa and the Middle East, into the West with help from various Italian mafia groups in the south.

 This can surely be read as a reflection of ISIS’s workings today – having started out in such dramatic, scare-mongering fashion with the tragic destruction of parts of Palmyra in their Syrian-controlled territory, the extremist group sparked widespread fear about the safety of the world’s cultural treasures and just where their own ferocious expansion would stop.

 Now the terrorist organisation seems to be on the ropes, with their Iraqi stronghold of Mosul about to fall, and their previous lucrative supply of liquid money from black market oil having been choked off by the West, they have been reduced to selling ancient treasures from their savage ransacking in order to finance their arms purchases.

 Ironically they themselves are now assigning immense value to these lucrative treasures, which they so carelessly and furiously destroyed not so long ago.

 Once the American public found out that many of their museums’ and collectors’ ancient ‘exotic’ artworks were being provided by ISIS, they immediately cut off the demand. Now Italy has to step up and do the same.

 While the ex-mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli has taken on the curation of the Colosseum exhibition that revives these treasures, the Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta Mafia, from Naples and Calabria, are replenishing ISIS’s money supply.

 Rutelli, who it is speculated wants to run for the position of UNESCO leader, should simultaneously be urging his colleagues in Italy’s political world to crack down on the mafia sale of objects from ransacked monuments.

 What the Italian restorers are doing in Rome is hugely admirable – re-engraving these immensely precious cultural testaments to ancient civilisations into the public consciousness and permanently preserving them in digital form.

 However, just as the West has reacted to ISIS exploits in the past, Italy must absolutely react now in relation to this less glossy art story.