He robbery at the Louvre museum (Paris) on October 19, 2025, when professional thieves stole several jewels from the Apolo gallery in less than 7 minutes, it shocked the world. Knowing what they had taken and how they had obtained it in such a short time and without being seen was a topic of conversation in the days following the event. But the case of the French museum is not unique: throughout history, many works of art have been stolen from the places where they were kept.
One of the most famous thefts took place in 1969, when the Nativity painting painted by the late Caravaggio from the altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo, a parish located in the heart of Palermo (Sicily), where it had hung for more than three centuries. Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence It was painted around 1600 and depicts Saints Francis of Assisi and Lawrence next to the Holy Family.
“My mother and aunt were the first to arrive on the scene. They were crying and screaming. I fell out of bed and ran to the church altar where the painting, which was now missing, hung. We spent the next few days mourning the loss. They didn’t steal a painting, they kidnapped a member of my family», recalled Antonella Lampone, daughter of the parish housekeeper at the time of the theft, in 2019 in a report for Tutor.
The theft, which occurred on the night of October 17 to 18, 1969 (56 years ago), shocked Italian citizens, who did not hesitate to name the culprit: The Italian mafia must be behind the theft.
Who really stole the painting
In 2019, Tutor revealed a video interview that the newspaper recorded exclusively in 2001 with the oratory’s priest, Benedetto Rocco, but which had not been shared until then. In the video, Rocco claimed that the Caravaggio painting was in the house of a powerful mafia boss, who had cut a piece of canvas to convince the Catholic Church sit down to negotiate to reach an agreement on his return.
According to the priest, this man contacted him up to twice by letter. We are talking about Gaetano Badalamentiwho was at the time one of the most powerful gangsters in Sicily and led a heroin trafficking network to the United States valued at $1.65 billion (approximately 1.4 billion euros).
A year earlier, the former gangster Gaetano Grado had confessed that the painting had been kept by Badalamenti and that, far from being destroyed, Cosa Nostra had decided fragment it into several parts to sell them on the black market.
To this day, the painting, valued at around $20 million (€17 million), remains unknown and the FBI maintains it in its Top 10 unsolved artistic crimes. At this point, investigators face a problem: it will become increasingly difficult to solve the crime because many suspects and witnesses to the theft died. Lampone’s mother died two years after the robbery, Badalamenti died in 2004, and Rocco died in 2013.
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