Caravaggio's Stolen Nativity, Oratorio di San Lorenzo

The Theft

The Italian parliament's Antimafia commission dates the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence to the night of October 17 to 18, 1969. Its report, approved on February 21, 2018, as Document XXIII number 44, calls the painting the most important work of art, in art-historical terms, ever stolen in Italy and perhaps anywhere.

The oil on canvas is 268 by 197 centimeters, about 8.8 by 6.5 feet, and was painted between 1600 and 1609. It hung over the altar of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo's Kalsa district. The thieves cut it from its frame along the edges with a blade and left the frame empty. The Oratory had no security system. The FBI, which lists the case among its Top Ten Art Crimes, says two thieves entered the building.

According to the newspaper L'Ora, as the commission quotes it, the loss was discovered at 3pm on Saturday, October 18. The night itself is less certain than the commission's date. Bernardo Tortorici di Raffadali, president of the Amici dei Musei Siciliani, the association that runs the Oratory, wrote in The Art Newspaper on October 8, 2019, that the congregation saw the painting for the last time at Mass on Sunday, October 12. He writes that the caretakers, the Gelfo sisters, found it gone on Saturday, October 18, when they came in to prepare for the next day's Mass, so the theft could have happened on any night in between. He also writes that the police report on the state of the premises has disappeared.

The Giornale di Sicilia put the theft on its front page on October 20, 1969, under a headline about a Caravaggio worth a billion lire. The commission names the archdiocese of Palermo as the legal owner. The FBI estimates the value at $20 million, and the commission adds that a stolen painting cannot be sold legally, so a market price may not exist.

On the Altar

A full-size copy of the painting by the studio Factum Arte was unveiled at the Oratory on December 12, 2015, with President Sergio Mattarella present. Sky Italia commissioned it, and it hangs on the altar for most of the year. Before it, according to Factum's project page, the frame held an enlargement of a 1968 photograph of the painting by Enzo Brai.

Since 2010, the Oratory has also run NEXT, in which a contemporary artist paints a new Nativity at the original's size. Each canvas is unveiled at midnight on December 24 and shown at the Oratory until October 17.

What the Commission Found

In 2017, the commission heard former mafia members who had become state witnesses. Its report concludes that the painting has not been lost, that it left Italy, and that it is probably still abroad. It says the work must now be considered on a par with a major mafia fugitive. The theft itself is time-barred, though the commission says the investigation was never interrupted.

The witnesses disagree about nearly everything else. One said the canvas was destroyed, then withdrew that. Another said a Swiss dealer bought it and cut it into four parts. A third said it was buried in an iron chest on a villa's grounds, and a police search of the villa in 1980 found nothing. The commission says its findings do not dispel every doubt about the disappearance.

The Palermo prosecutor's office reopened its file in June 2018, against persons unknown. In August 2026, Il Post wrote that after almost 60 years nobody knows who took the canvas, where it is, or whether it was destroyed. Nothing has been recovered.

The commission closes its report with the title of Leonardo Sciascia's last story, Una storia semplice, and writes that the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity is truly a simple story.

Gaetano Grado. Grado, a former mafia member, told the commission that a gang of petty thieves took the painting on their own initiative, not on commission. He said a mafia boss, who had read about the theft in the newspaper, asked him two days later to find it and called it "U Caravaggiu." By Grado's account the thieves were paid 4 or 5 million lire, the canvas passed through several hands in Palermo, and it reached the boss in Cinisi intact except for frayed edges where the frame had been removed. A Swiss dealer, probably from Lugano, came to see it. Grado says the dealer sat down, looked at the painting, and wept. He said he would buy it, that it could not be resold because its value was beyond measure, and that he would cut it, depending on how many buyers he found. The canvas left Cinisi whole on a covered fruit truck, and Grado says it was cut into four parts and sold. The boss paid Grado 50,000 Swiss francs for his part. The commission identified the dealer from a photograph lineup, says he died long ago, and withheld his name.

Francesco Marino Mannoia. Mannoia told Judge Giovanni Falcone in 1989, and repeated in 1996, that the painting had been destroyed. In 2017, he told the commission he had said so because he was under stress and did not want to go on. His new version has a buyer seeing the canvas in a disused ice factory near the Ponte Ammiraglio, calling the thieves criminals, and leaving because it was damaged. A man he names then loaded it onto a Lambretta, and Mannoia says that is where his knowledge ends. He says it may still be in stables belonging to that man's family. Carabinieri searched the area and found nothing. The commission adds that investigators suspected his earlier statement referred to a different canvas of similar size stolen from a Palermo church in the same period.

Gaspare Spatuzza. Spatuzza said the canvas had been hidden in a pigsty, where rodents damaged it. Il Foglio's 2015 account describes a stable where it waited for a black market buyer, ruined by pigs and rats. The commission traced his information to a man who was a child in 1969 and had it from a third person, and found that neither could be sure the canvas was the Nativity. It calls the account "mere voci," mere rumors.

Vincenzo La Piana and Gerlando Alberti. La Piana told prosecutors in 1999 that around 1978 or 1979 he saw the canvas, without its frame, at Alberti's villa in contrada Sant'Onofrio, and that Alberti buried it in an iron chest in the grounds, with dollars and refined heroin. Police raided the villa on August 26, 1980, and found nothing. When the commission heard La Piana again, his description of Alberti's canvas was, in its words, entirely incompatible with the Nativity, and it concluded that the lead to Alberti had lost substance.

Giovanni Brusca. Brusca said the Corleonesi offered the canvas back in exchange for easing the 41-bis prison regime. Il Foglio notes that this never came up at the State-mafia trial, and the commission says Cosa nostra made no mention of returning the painting in its dealings with the state.

Peter Watson. In his 1984 book The Caravaggio Conspiracy, Watson says he posed as a buyer and arranged a meeting at Laviano, in Salerno province, for the evening of November 23, 1980. The Irpinia earthquake struck that day and the meeting did not take place. Investigators later checked his account but could not prove the canvas in it was the Caravaggio.

The Oratory's account. Tortorici writes that the Oratory's custodian in 1969, Monsignor Rocco, accused a mafia boss of the theft at the time and said he was shown a piece of canvas. He also writes that RAI had filmed the Oratory for a program on hidden treasures broadcast in August 1969, which Rocco blamed. Tortorici notes logistical and geographical inaccuracies in the statements of two informants.

The Oratory is open every day from 10am to 6pm. It closes on December 25 and August 15, closes at 2pm on December 24 and 31, and opens at 2pm on January 1. A full ticket cost €3 in 2026, and a reduced ticket cost €2 for groups of 10 and for holders of a Circuito del Sacro ticket. The Amici dei Musei Siciliani, which runs the Oratory, takes questions and bookings on +39 091 6118168 and at info@amicimuseisiciliani.it. The Comune di Palermo's 2026 tourism listing notes that sites can change their hours without notice, so a call beforehand is sensible.

The altar wall shows the Factum Arte copy for most of the year, and the yearly NEXT canvas goes up there at midnight on December 24. The 2025 to 2026 canvas, by Maïa Régis, is listed to remain at the Oratory until October 17, 2026. For the previous edition, a canvas by Michelangelo Pistoletto, the Oratory announced that it would stay on the altar until January 8, 2025, and then move to the anti-oratory. Which canvas hangs on the altar on a given day is best confirmed by phone.

The stucco is the permanent attraction. Giacomo Serpotta made it between 1699 and 1706: eight scenes from the lives of Saints Lawrence and Francis, with allegorical Virtues. The instruments held by the stucco angels over the altar were stolen while the Oratory stood abandoned, and 3D-made copies replaced them.