The Caravaggio taken from Palermo in 1969

On the night of 17 to 18 October 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo in the Kalsa district of Palermo and took Caravaggio’s Nativity from above the high altar. That is the date given by the anti-mafia commission of the Italian parliament in its 2018 report. Other sources differ. Bernardo Tortorici di Raffadali, who runs a society of Sicilian museum friends, writes in The Art Newspaper that the congregation last saw the canvas at Mass on 12 October. The Guardian reports that the canvas was cut from its frame with razors. Antonella Lampone, daughter of the oratory’s housekeeper, says the thieves came through a street-side window on a rainy night.

The painting is about 268 by 197 centimetres, oil on canvas. The Guardian says it hung in the oratory for more than 350 years. It was last restored in Rome in 1951, and photographs were made then. Its date is disputed. Writers of the 17th century put it in Sicily in 1609. Since the 1920s many scholars have argued for Rome, about 1600.

The parish priest, Mgr Benedetto Rocco, blamed a RAI television programme on hidden treasures, broadcast in August 1969. In a 2001 video interview shown by the Guardian, he said letters came some months later. The first asked for an advertisement in a Palermo newspaper. The second held a small piece of canvas. He says the Palermo superintendent of fine arts refused a second advertisement and reported him to the police, who briefly investigated him. Rocco died in 2013.

Every account of where the painting went is a witness claim, and none is proved. Francesco Marino Mannoia, a convicted heroin dealer who became an informant, is said to have told Judge Giovanni Falcone in 1989 that the painting was cut up and burned. He repeated it at the Andreotti trial in 1996. In 2017 he told the commission he had said “burned” to end the pressure on him, and that it was never burned. Gaspare Spatuzza, jailed from 1997 for several murders and an informant from 2009, said in December 2009 that a fellow prisoner told him the canvas was kept in a stable and eaten by rats and pigs. The commission calls this generic and unreliable.

Gaetano Grado, a mafia informant heard by the commission on 11 May 2017, gave a different account. He says small-time thieves stole it unprompted. Two days later the Cinisi boss Gaetano Badalamenti, who was never charged over the painting and died in 2004, asked him to find it. Grado says it passed up a chain of Palermo families to Badalamenti, who sold it to an elderly Swiss dealer, now dead. Grado says he received 50,000 Swiss francs.

The commission, led by Rosy Bindi, called Grado’s account highly credible. It concluded that the painting was not destroyed, and was probably cut up and sold abroad, probably through Switzerland. It said it was certain who the thieves were but did not publish their names, and that the theft crime is time-barred. No one has been convicted of the theft. The commission also said that Grado’s account still needs verification. The Palermo prosecutor reopened the file on 18 June 2018, against unknown persons.

In December 2015 a full-size digital re-creation, made by Factum Arte of Madrid for Sky, was unveiled in the oratory. President Sergio Mattarella attended. On 23 November 2024, deputy prosecutor Marzia Sabella said she was sure the painting exists and will surface. In December 2025 RSI found no public source confirming that the inquiry is active. The original is still missing.