While thousands of people were celebrating in the streets of Messina during a major summer festival, thieves pulled off a quiet heist inside the city's main museum, escaping with four priceless 15th-century Renaissance paintings.
The robbery took place on Saturday night at Sicily's Regional Interdisciplinary Museum around 9:50 PM. Police reported that intruders managed to bypass the museum's security systems without triggering any alarms. All four stolen works are attributed to Antonello da Messina, one of the most celebrated master painters of the early Italian Renaissance.
Among the missing items are three wooden panels from the famous San Gregorio Polyptych, painted in 1473. The multi-panel artwork depicts the Virgin Mary holding an infant Jesus, surrounded by saints and angels. It was the only surviving masterpiece by Antonello that had never left his hometown. The thieves also took a small double-sided wooden panel depicting the Virgin and Child on one side and Christ on the other, removing it directly from inside a locked display case.
Because all the stolen paintings were created on thick wooden panels, they could not be rolled up or easily hidden. Investigators believe the theft was carefully planned by professional art thieves operating on behalf of black-market buyers.
The incident highlights a worrisome trend across Europe, where more than a dozen major museum robberies have been recorded since early 2025. Although Italian police recently recovered three valuable paintings stolen from a museum in Parma earlier this year, cultural heritage experts remain alarmed by how easily thieves are targeting historical treasures.