Art Connoisseur's Body to Be Exhumed in Italy to Settle Row Over £300m Estate

An Italian court ruled yesterday that the body of the British art connoisseur Sir Harold Acton can be exhumed from its Tuscan burial place for DNA tests to help establish whether five Italians who are claiming to be his illegitimate relatives are the rightful heirs to a multimillion-pound estate.

The estate, which includes a 15th-century Medici family villa, a priceless art collection and 40,000 rare books, was left to New York University when Sir Harold, a good friend of the Queen, died in 1994 at the age of 89. It was reportedly worth £300m at the time.

If the DNA tests prove the Italians' claim, they believe they should inherit more than half the estate.

"We are delighted," said Comtessa Guia di Campalto, one of the five siblings making the claim. "New York University teaches its students about the truth. But it has never wanted these tests. They have always been against us."

The comtessa works in public relations. Her two sisters and two brothers are all wealthy business figures living in the US and Italy.

"This is not about greed or money," said Micah D Wells, the comtessa's lawyer. "It is about restoring integrity of these natural relatives and reclaiming the family name."

The five Italians claim they are related to Sir Harold through their mother, Liana Beacci, who began legal proceedings to prove she was Sir Harold's half-sister after he died. Beacci, who has also since died, said she was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Harold's father and a secretary he met at his dentist's clinic.

Beacci's claim was ruled out by the country's highest appeal court in 1997, but Judge Fiorenzo Zazzeri told the Florence court yesterday that her children did have a prima facie paternity claim which merited DNA tests.

Forensic scientists will dig up the bodies of Arthur Acton, Sir Harold's father, and Beacci, possibly as early as May. The judge reserved the right to take Sir Harold out of his grave as well, since forensic scientists warned that the DNA of his father, dead for more than 50 years, might have deteriorated too much to provide conclusive evidence.

Sir Harold, an Oxford graduate and lover of the poetry of TS Eliot, is thought to have inspired the undergraduate aesthete character Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.

His Anglo-Italian father collected medieval and Renaissance paintings and his American mother had a habit of sending him white truffles for tea when he was at Eton and plovers' eggs when he was at Oxford. Father and son are buried alongside illustrious, non-Catholic foreigners in the Allore cemetery in the hills outside Florence, his birthplace.

In later life he mixed on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group and entertained the likes of DH Lawrence, Picasso, Churchill and Graham Greene among the art treasures at the family villa, La Pietra, a Medici palace built in 1460 on the Montughi hills outside the Tuscan city. He wrote histories of the Medicis and his last work, in 1993, was Memoirs of an Aesthete.

The 5,000-piece collection he left includes gems by such artists as Bernardo Daddi and Donatello.

Nine years ago the Prince and Princess of Wales stayed in the villa and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton dined with other world leaders at La Pietra on the opening night of a Florence summit in 1999.

The villa has now been meticulously restored at "considerable cost" to New York University and American students soak up knowledge walking through the neatly trimmed lawns of the university's most sumptuous European outpost.

NYU has fought the claims of Beacci's two sons and three daughters for the past eight years. A Florence-based lawyer for the estate, Andrea Scavetta, has privately agreed that Beacci looked "uncannily" like Sir Harold but the university is sceptical about her paternity claim.

"The lady moved too late," said Carlo Canessa, the chief representative for NYU in the case. "She was born over 80 years ago. But she only claimed to have the 'right chromosome' in 1997."

The university believes it is unlikely the DNA tests will produce proof and argues that the law at the time of Sir Harold's death means his estate should be handled through English law, which at the time ruled out illegitimate relatives for inheritance. The lawyers also claim that the villa had not been bought with the Acton family fortune, but was in fact purchased in 1902 with money from Hortense Mitchell, Arthur Acton's wealthy wife.

The comtessa's lawyer said there was no doubt Beacci was Sir Harold's half-sister and that she had been the "apple of his father's eye", often visiting La Pietra with her children while he was alive. Arthur commissioned a painting for her every year on her birthday, sent her to Paris to buy clothes, and bought her one of the country's first Fiats when she was 18, he said.

"He verbally acknowledged her and the whole of Florence knew she was his daughter," the lawyer said.

He suggested there might have been some rivalry between Sir Harold and his half-sister for their father's favour.

"I do not wish to cast aspersions but when a $500m treasure trove is at stake it's for everyone to wonder if attempts are being made to prevent the truth emerging," he said. He is keen for all the bodies of the Actons to be matched to the five Italians as soon as possible.

"I wouldn't be surprised if someone thinks of moving a few sets of bones around," he warned.

The Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi, a prominent figure in Florentine high society, was concerned at the prospect of Sir Harold's body being dug up.

"It's pretty awful that they want to take his body out of the cemetery," she said. "Harold himself would have hated it. Although anybody else would, too."

From Tammy to Jimi: life beyond the grave

The remains of Yves Montand, the French actor and singer who died in 1991, were exhumed in 1998 to test whether Aurore Drossart had been born of an affair he had with her mother in the 1970s. DNA tests proved they were not related.

The widow of President Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, battled for her husband to be unearthed to prove that he was a Soviet agent who assumed the identity of Oswald while the American was in the USSR in 1959. They dug the remains up in 1981 and found them to be Oswald's.

The daughters of country singer Tammy Wynette filed a $50m wrongful death lawsuit against a drug firm they claimed sold too much painkiller to their mother, who died in 1998 aged 55, and failed to provide proper medical monitoring. In 1999 the singer's body was exhumed and examined. The Nashville medical examiner ruled that she had died of heart failure caused by damage from repeated blood clots, and said too much time had elapsed to tell if drugs played a significant role.

The digging up of maverick Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn's coffin for reburial in Italy was shown live on national television.

The body of rock legend Jimi Hendrix was exhumed and relocated within a cemetery in Renton, just outside Seattle in 2002, it was reported. The body was transferred in secret from the grave where he was buried shortly after his death in 1970. The new memorial had been three years in the planning.

The body of James Hanratty, who was hanged in 1962 for the murder of Michael Gregsten, was exhumed in 2001. Hanratty's family alleged that there had been a miscarriage of justice. But his DNA perfectly matched strands found on the victim's clothes. The question of contamination of evidence over such a long period was raised but Hanratty's lawyers were refused permission to appeal last year.

Paternity suits separately involving composer Giacomo Puccini, Italian leader Benito Mussolini and Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna have all called for their bodies to be exhumed, though none has been as yet.

Research: Sally James Gregory