In the hours when Messina's streets swelled with the ancient celebration of the Assumption, thieves slipped through the MuMe museum's defenses and removed four paintings by Antonello da Messina — works that have outlasted empires, earthquakes, and centuries of human upheaval, only to vanish into the criminal underworld on a summer night. The stolen panels, including three from a 1473 polyptych and a double-sided Pietà valued between $81 and $92 million, are not merely art objects but the living memory of a city and a civilization. What the thieves carried away in the dark, they cannot easily s