English · Drill 44
English practice 44
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and endlessly parodied1 was stolen, and it remained missing3 but this was4 Peruggia tried his hardest to keep calm off6 He found Perrugia wasn't the only one in the Louvre that day8 who had a plan. as quickly as possible9 as a publicity stunt10 feared masterwork was gone forever11 Perrugia was motivated from whence13 Still, a lot of good came out of the business after all:15
admired, analyzed, 
for over 500 years. You’d think that any sane thief would set his sights on a less ambitious target. But in 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, 
for two years.
enough time for him to formulate a daring plan. Knowing that the museum would be closed for restorations on August 21, he hid inside at closing the night before. The following day, 
until he found himself alone in the gallery where the Mona Lisa hung.
the wall and absconded into a stairwell, where he smashed the frame, then rolled up the painting and hid it in his smock.
the door at the bottom of the stairs locked, he smashed the knob, and calmly reported the broken lock to a custodian on his way out of the building.
Many workers passed the empty space on the wall where they knew the Mona Lisa usually hung, but since restorations were taking place all day, just assumed that the museum’s prized possession was being touched up or reframed 
. When it was discovered that the painting was gone, a massive manhunt began. Theorizing that a radical young artist might have stolen it 
, police even arrested and questioned such figures as Pablo Picasso and surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
for the crime led to its recovery: he felt that the Mona Lisa belonged in da Vinci’s native Italy, 
had been stolen by Napoleon a century earlier. In 1913, he smuggled it there and offered it to the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Perrugia expected a hero’s welcome and a reward for his patriotic crime, but gallery personnel stalled him while police were called, and he was arrested.
the Mona Lisa was exhibited all over Italy for months before being returned to the Louvre, and as for Vincenzo Perrugia himself, the Italian courts took his patriotism (and the popularity of his crime in Italy) into consideration, and for the theft of the most priceless portable object on the face of the earth, he served only a few months in jail!