On the night of Sicily's most beloved summer celebration, four irreplaceable Renaissance paintings by Antonello da Messina — among the rarest surviving works of the early Italian Renaissance — were taken from a Messina museum by thieves who had studied the rhythms of a city given over to festivity. Valued at some €80 million, the works are not merely financial assets but cultural memory made visible, including the only Antonello masterpiece to have remained in his native city. Art crime scholars remind us that such thefts rarely end in a sale — these paintings are more likely to disappear into