The remains, contained in a crystal urn, arrived in Porto Ercole by boat on Saturday, in a symbolic re-enactment of the voyage which first brought the troubled Lombardy-born painter to Tuscany in the late 16th century.

“I’m happy that he’s returned and to be able to give him the burial-place he deserved,” said Silvano Vinceti, head of Italy’s National Committee for Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage, at an official ceremony. He said the painter’s final resting place would “probably  0” be in his native town of Caravaggio, near Milan.

The urn will be on display for a month in the local Forte Stella alongside a photographic exhibition recounting the stages of a year-long investigation by microbiologists, art historians and anthropologists to determine the bones’ identity. The bones had been kept in a church in Porto Ercole after being exhumed from an unmarked grave in a local cemetery in 1956.

The team said they were 85 percent certain that the set of bones of a man who died in about 1610, aged between 38 and 40, were of the painter. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was said to have died of malaria in the marshy southern Tuscan region of Maremma in 1610 when not yet 40.