Stealing from churches

 Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence,”

On July 4 , 2018, around 250 police officers searched over 40 places of worship in Italy, Germany, Spain and England. This followed 4 years of investigations by Italian policemen in an operation called Demetra, which arrested 23 suspects, and recovered 25,000 objects of art, worth $47,000,000. The police found out that the international center of this sort of crime was in Caltanisetta, Sicily. From there these artistic items were shipped to Germany where they were sold in an auction. In the meantime, the Italian police are still investigating the robbery of one of the most infamous art thefts of the 20th century, Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence,” which was snatched from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in the heart of Palermo in 1969 by two unidentified raiders who cut it out of its frame with knives.

Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo - the missing Caravaggio.

According to one account the painting, which today would be worth at least £13 million, ended up being hidden in a farm in the Sicilian countryside, where it was eventually nibbled to nothing by rats and mice. Another story, told to Italian police by a well-known mafia informer, recounts that the painting, which is 2.7 metres high and nearly two metres wide, was used as a floor mat by Toto Riina, the murderous head of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra Mafia group. Yet another theory holds that it was destroyed in an earthquake in Irpinia in the southern region of Campania in 1980, shortly before it was to be sold on the black market. Whatever became of it, one thing is sure – it was never recovered and is listed by the FBI as one of the world’s top 10 art crimes.