The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Italian culture ministry will sign an agreement today in Rome turning over to Italy 20 disputed antiquities from the museum’s collection, including the prized Euphronios krater.

A signing ceremony will be held today involving the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello, and the Italian cultural minister, Rocco Buttiglione. Mr. de Montebello finalized the deal in a seven-hour meeting with ministry officials yesterday, a museum spokesman, Harold Holzer, said.

Details of the pact are expected today, but Mr. Holzer said it follows the framework proposed by Mr. de Montebello during a November meeting with Mr. Buttiglione in Rome.That proposal centered on an arrangement in which the Met would return legal title of the disputed objects to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of objects “of equivalent beauty and importance.” The 20 objects include a 15-piece set of Hellenistic silver and the Euphronios, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase.

The final agreement comes less than three weeks after the Met acknowledged for the first time that Italy had offered sufficient evidence to support its long-held claims that the objects were taken illegally from the country.

Neither the Euphronios nor the set of silver are expected to leave the museum anytime soon. While officials would not say yesterday when the objects would be returned, the Met had asked to keep them in the museum at least through the opening of a new Roman court in spring 2007.The museum had also submitted a “wish list” of pieces it wanted to borrow from Italy’s collection as part of the loan exchange, but Mr. Holzer said those loans had not been determined as of yesterday.

Cultural scholars and collectors alike have closely watched the museum’s negotiations with Italy over the past several months for signs of how a potential deal would alter the worldwide antiquities trade. Italian prosecutors and cultural officials have rocked the industry in recent years by aggressively targeting antiquities dealers and museums that the Italians claim have purchased looted art. An American art dealer, Robert Hecht, and a former curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Ange les, Marion True, are now on trial in Rome for conspiring to traffic in looted art. Both have denied wrongdoing.

The Getty Museum has already returned several disputed pieces to Italy, and officials are negotiating deals on others.

Some cultural observers who had been critical of the Met’s reluctance to admit the shady history of the Euphronios are now applauding the museum for negotiating a deal that works to its favor. The director of DePaul University’s program on cultural heritage law, Patricia Gerstenblith, said Italy was “quite generous” to agree to the loan exchange, and noted that Mr. de Montebello’s trip to Rome just before Thanksgiving was crucial to a favorable deal for the museum.

The Euphronios has been on display at the Met for more than three decades.The museum purchased the vase from Mr. Hecht in 1971, and the acquisition has been clouded by suspicion ever since.

Still, some collectors worry that the Met’s decision to return the krater will put a chill on future antiquities trading, in addition to depriving millions of New York museum visitors from seeing what is considered one of the finest examples of Greek art. They dispute Italy’s claim of ownership, saying the country should not have the rights to objects created before it existed.

To Ms. Gerstenblith, that argument has little merit, since it ignores the “very clear legal basis” to Italy’s claims. “Countries have the right to own and control what’s found within their borders,” she said, adding that cultural property laws were designed to protect sites against looting.