Mourning Caravaggio's Nativity

The theft has always been attributed to the mafia, and for four decades, art lovers have hoped the painting might some day resurface from an underworld private museum . But going back to the records of a trial of a pentito – a mafia insider who becomes a state witness – I was sadly convinced by his account of how the gangsters who stole Caravaggio's work brutally mistreated it to destruction.