NEW YORK—Manhattan gallery Phoenix Ancient Art is returning 251 antiquities valued at $2.7 million to Italy, even though a Geneva court in 2007 rejected an Italian claim and awarded title of the objects to Phoenix. “We chose to return the disputed items to the Italian state,” says C. Michael Hedqvist, managing director of Phoenix’s Geneva space.

According to Italian officials, the antiquities may have been illegally acquired and exported in the 1980s from Etruscan tombs in central Italy and burial sites in southern Italy. Phoenix says it is urging other dealers to follow its example in repatriating antiquities whose proper ownership may be in doubt, as institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts have done.