Four Antonella da Messina works stolen from Messina museum

Four works by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen during an annual religious festival on the Feast of the Assumption in his native Sicilian city on Saturday. They were some of the only works by Antonello held in Messina. While hundreds of devotees and onlookers in Piazza Duomo were paying homage to the Vara procession, with security measures in place to ensure everything ran smoothly, and the Ferragosto sun had set a couple of hours earlier, the sensational robbery took place at the regional museum, 4 km away from the site of the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It brought to mind the incredible and daring theft carried out almost a year ago at the Louvre in Paris, when a gang made off with millions of euros' worth of jewels in a matter of minutes. Shortly