ROME As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero's welcome here on Friday. When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for information on its provenance. This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one of 21 treasures turned over by the Met under the terms of a pathbreaking 2006 accord. As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the state attorney's office, Italy's culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from Homer's "Iliad" illustrated on the vase's main panel. The Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received in the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) bear him home. The event was held at the attorney's office to underscore the persistence of the Italian lawyers who have lobbied for the return of antiquities from American museums, dealers and private collectors over the last three years. "In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate something positive," said Italy's attorney general, Oscar Fiumara. (The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this week: the justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an appearance at Rome's main university; and Naples is submerged in trash.) In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in Los Angeles, Boston and Princeton, N.J., and with the private collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this week transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with other institutions in the United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr. Rutelli said on Friday. But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special place, symbolizing the war against clandestine tomb-robbing and illicit trafficking of the nation's cultural patrimony. So the general mood was victorious. "The Italian state has won," said Rocco Buttiglione, the former culture minister who initiated the talks with the Met just over two years ago and took part in the ceremony. "This is a success story." The vessel is to go on view on Saturday at the Quirinale, or presidential palace, where 68 other artifacts recovered from museums through similar accords are grouped in an exhibition titled "Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces." (Nostoi is ancient Greek for homecoming.) Fewer than 30 vases by Euphronios, one of the greatest artists of ancient Greece, are known to have survived. The krater returned by the Met dates from around 515 B.C. and is considered one of his finest achievements. Italian archaeologists have traced most of the existing Euphronios vases to Cerveteri, known as Caere in Etruscan times, an area of steep slopes and raised tomb chambers. Caere was also "a privileged market for red-figure production, and Euphronios in particular," said Maria Antonietta Rizzo, an archaeologist whose research on Euphronios persuaded the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return a rare kylix, or drinking cup, by that artist in 1999. That piece is signed by Euphronios as the potter, and by his protégé Onesimos as the painter. Italian court records based on a state investigation say the Met krater was dug up in the Greppe Sant'Angelo area, near Cerveteri, in December 1971 by a gang of tomb robbers. After that, the records say, it passed through the hands of a convicted Italian antiquities dealer and then was sold to the Met by the American dealer Robert Hecht, who is on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities. He denies the charges. If a memoir seized by law enforcement officials during a 2001 raid on Mr. Hecht's Paris apartment is to be believed, the krater arrived in style in New York in 1972, in its own first-class seat on a TWA flight from Zurich. (Mr. Hecht now discounts that memoir as fiction.) It returned to Italy on Thursday in somewhat more modest circumstances: a blue box in the cargo hold labeled "Handle With Care." A few hours after Friday's ceremony, the krater was transported to the state television network, RAI, and paraded on an evening broadcast, with the culture minister and a news anchor sitting proudly nearby. "Euphronios could never have imagined that one day he'd find himself featured" on the 8 o'clock news, Mr. Rutelli said on live television. "We are proud to be at the forefront of the battle to fight looted antiquities."