Piacenza, Italy. December 2019.
A gardener was clearing ivy from the outside walls of the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery, a museum of modern art in this small city in northern Italy, about an hour from Milan. In one spot, the ivy had covered the wall for at least ten years.
As he pulled the leaves away, he uncovered something that did not belong there: a metal panel, set into the wall. Until that day, the ivy had hidden it completely.
Behind the panel was a hollow space. Someone had stuffed a black bag inside it.
“At first I thought it was trash,” the gardener said. “But then I called my superiors right away.”
Inside the bag was a painting with no frame. It showed a woman with rosy cheeks and large, almond-shaped eyes. She was looking back over her shoulder.
Nobody could say who had pushed the bag into the wall, or when. Had it been sitting there in the dark for years, behind the ivy, or had someone slipped it in more recently? And why would anyone hide a painting inside the walls of an art museum, of all places?
Gallery officials looked closely at the woman's face. They began to suspect they knew who she was. If they were right, the painting the gardener had first taken for trash was worth an estimated $66 million.
Christmas was two weeks away. If the painting was what they hoped, the gallery's vice president said, its return would “be the best Christmas present ever.”
This gallery had a mystery of its own. It had never been solved.