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Police decided against issuing her the usual fine, and are instead using the case to promote awareness of the crime of antiquities theft.

The woman, contacted in Montreal Sunday night, disputed this account of Italian authorities.

“I never cried for remorse,” she said, and described a “feeling of culpability” that grew over time, while she was living in China, and learning about artifacts sold abroad, “or bought at high price by rich Chinese to give them back to the country.”

She said she tried several times before to return the piece to Pompeii, but met “administrative challenges.”

She rejected the description of “guilt,” and said it was her “conscience, which came with age and with living in China,” where artifacts are “national belonging.”

“What had prompted me to take the piece was my Italian origin, and I took it as a souvenir of my first trip to my ancestors’ land,” she said.

Theft has been a recurring problem for Pompeii, an ancient Roman village famous for being devastated by a volcanic eruption, which covered it in ash and preserved the architecture and corpses. Its excavation, mostly completed in the 19th century, has made it a major global tourist draw.

In March, for example, a Canadian tried to take a piece of Rome’s Colosseum for a souvenir, and two American tourists were recently stopped at Rome’s airport with a heavy artifact from Pompeii in their luggage.

Such a positive and emotionally uplifting outcome to antiquities theft is rare, reflecting the strange power that guilt can have, even decades after the original offence, which the woman could date quite precisely because of the wedding to June 29, 1964.