Elisabetta Povoledo

Rau found one answer in contemporary Italy, where his project — part movie, part documentary, part political campaign — unfolded this year. To play Christ, he chose a former migrant seasonal worker, one of the thousands who harvest sundry crops — mostly tomatoes, olives and oranges — in the fields of southern Italy. They work long, exhausting hours for negligible pay while being forced to live in overcrowded, derelict shantytowns, often with no access to electricity or water.

So one late September afternoon, an offbeat parade of migrants mostly from African nations, young Italians, members of various nongovernmental organizations, journalists, locals with their dogs and even a donkey — snaked along the white-stoned streets of the southern town of Matera, chanting “work, dignity, rights.” Dressed in a nondescript black T-shirt and jeans, Rau marched in the crowd, pumping his fist to the chants as cameras rolled.

Jesus and his apostles led the parade, which was actually the movie’s scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, and they stopped on the steps of Matera’s cathedral under the sweltering afternoon sun to sing “Bella Ciao,” an old Italian song that has been adopted as an anthem against fascism.

Speeches followed: about the hardships the migrants endure to put food on Italians’ tables; about the difficulties they face as foreigners in Italy; about the hostility, racism and bureaucratic loopholes that prevent many from achieving legal immigration status.

Their monologues were often interrupted by the cries of “dignity, dignity,” and “freedom, freedom.”

“There will be hatred against us; I ask you to resist,” Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroonian, told the crowd members, who cheered. “We have to fight. We have to remain united.”

Sagnet, who was knighted in 2016 by the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, for his work with migrants, is Jesus. Other advocates for migrants’ rights — also black Africans living in Italy — were chosen to play the apostles, along with one Italian who is active in a small farmer’s rights group.

Finally, a truck rolled into the piazza and dumped thousands of ripe tomatoes onto the pavement. Jesus and his apostles began stomping on them with gusto, crying, “Let’s destroy what destroys us.”

“The New Gospel” is an original work for Matera 2019, part of a series of events for this city’s turn as European capital of culture, an initiative in which cities host programs highlighting European cultural diversity.

Matera is known for its distinctive “sassi,” a honeycomb of cave dwellings occupied since Paleolithic times that have made it a photogenic stand-in for the Holy Land. The UNESCO World Heritage Site was struck by severe storms this week, which caused a torrent that swept through the ancient city.

The intellectual, poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed his 1964 movie “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” here, and Mel Gibson followed suit with “The Passion of the Christ” 40 years later. (In September, Rau shared set time with the production of the latest Bond film).

Rau said his initial idea had been to bring together actors who had worked here with Pasolini and Gibson and “do a new Jesus film.”

But once he arrived in Matera and came to know of the hardships of the thousands of migrant tomato-pickers who toil in the fields of Basilicata and nearby Puglia, living in dire conditions, the project took a radical turn.

“I found out that this is the political situation there,” and that gave birth to a project that brought together a “mix of real activists, of authentic people and of actors,” he said, including former Spanish actor (and computer chess expert) Enrique Irazoqui, who played Jesus in the Pasolini film, and Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern, who played Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Gibson’s film. Rau is now editing the movie and he said it would make the rounds of film festivals before its theatrical release a year from now.

The multidisciplinary project “is quite complicated,” said the director, whose taboo-challenging productions have never shied away from polemics.

Rau and his crew filmed for hours in a shantytown near Matera and others beyond. They shot scripted scenes for the “Jesus film,” and they staged public events as part of an emancipatory political campaign — called The Revolt of Dignity — that was conceived by Rau to support the rights of migrants exploited by a system that they say treats them as slaves.

Sagnet said the campaign aimed to create a bottom-up network that would fight for migrants’ rights in Italy and beyond: “The film is the beginning, not the end. It’s the beginning of a process of participation from the ground up, of people in difficulty.”

In Rome’s storied Teatro Argentina, and a month later in an open-air church in downtown Palermo, Sicily, scripted scenes for the film were followed by unscripted public debates. In Rome, the deputy mayor was booed when he said he couldn’t support squatters’ rights, while Palermo’s mayor was cheered for giving residence permits to migrants.

In both cities, Sagnet put to a vote a campaign manifesto drafted by the apostles, as well as by Rau and his dramaturge, Eva-Marie Bertschy, calling for rights like freedom of movement, adequate housing and humane working conditions.

In both cities the manifesto was adopted by the audience in a landslide.

“For us, Jesus was a prophet and an activist for justice,” said Sagnet. “He was a union leader, he fought. Jesus was all this.” Right-wing newspapers following the saga wrote that casting a black Christ “was an offense against Christianity,” he said.

Rau said a black Jesus inevitably brought slavery to mind, as well as racist violence. “It’s a metaphor of racism and the whole story of this kind of violence against black people,” he said.

The great merit of Rau’s film was that it put “a spotlight on a stain on the consciousness of any Italian, which is the existence of ghettos for migrants who are exploited in the agricultural business in the South of Italy,” said Lorenzo Marsili, founder of the Transeuropa Festival, which hosted Rau in Palermo. Empowering the oppressed — “this is what we think good art in a moment of crisis, such as the one that Western democracies are living through, should be doing,” he said.

In Palermo last weekend, a fisherman’s boat carrying Sagnet and a half-dozen apostles floated toward a sandy beach as dusk began to fall. On shore, the other apostles awaited, along with the mission leader of “Mediterranea Saving Humans,” a humanitarian group whose ships rescue shipwrecked migrants.

They all embraced when they landed.

“Having Jesus welcomed by a rescue worker seemed very powerful to us,” Luca Casarini, the Mediterranea mission leader, said in an interview. For years now, tens of thousands of migrants have crossed the Mediterranean from Africa in search of a better life. Many do not make it; others are fortunate enough to have been saved by rescue ships.

Then the apostles and onlookers walked to a nearby cultural center.

There, one apostle, Papa Latyr Faye, known as Hervé, who runs a housing project for migrants near Foggia, in Puglia, told the gathered audience that the walk from the port had been “very moving.”

“The best thing was not walking alone but together,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

A Director Asks, Would Jesus Stand With Today's Migrants?

MATERA, Italy — For his cinematic retelling of the story of Jesus Christ, “The New Gospel,” the Swiss-born, Belgium-based director Milo Rau sought answers to some questions: What would Jesus preach in the 21st century? Who would he stand with? What would he fight for?

This is the tragically familiar journey that has been made across the Mediterranean by countless migrants fleeing war and famine in recent times. But instead of transpiring in the sea between Italy and Libya, this scene was being enacted on the stage of the Teatro Massimo, an opera house in the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

Co-produced by the theater and by the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, “Winter Journey,” which has its world premiere in Palermo on Friday, tells the story of desperate migration from troubled, war-torn countries to Europe, in all its indifference and rejection.

“It is a journey toward a country where they will find hostility, a cold welcome or perhaps no welcome at all, to a place where there is a winter of the soul,” said Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, who wrote the score of the opera to a libretto by Irish novelist Colm Toibin. “It is a journey to a hostile world,” Einaudi said, “in which your soul can die.”

The story is told from the perspective of three characters: a man from an unnamed country moving from hardship to hardship as he seeks a better life in Europe, and the woman and child he has left behind. The choir serves as a Greek chorus, while a politician (a speaking role) intervenes intermittently with refrains that will be familiar to many European ears: “The boat cannot dock at our port,” “Why should we deal with this problem?” and, “We do not want strangers on our streets.”

oibin said in a telephone interview that the work was “a simple story, almost a folk tale,” in which the main characters “sing their own stories,” focusing on the personal to “stir emotions.” But “Winter Journey” is not a simple call for open borders, he said. “Even though it is clear where my sympathies lie, I am alert to the complexity of the argument, and that has to be registered.”

Einaudi is both a prolific composer (this year, he released “Seven Days Walking,” a series of seven albums that came out over seven months) and a versatile one, drawing on various influences.

African music — which Einaudi studied on the continent — informed the composition of “Winter Journey,” he said. “I am well acquainted with the instrumental and vocal nuances of that part of the world, and so in composing the orchestral parts, I created a nest in which these voices could nestle in a natural way.”

“They coexist very well and harmoniously,” he added.

“Winter Journey” is billed as an opera, but the main performers are not professionally trained opera singers — though they are well-known African artists. The man is played by Badara Seck of Senegal, the woman by Rokia Traoré of Mali, while the role of the child is sung by a boy, Leslie Nsiah Afriyie, who was born in Ghana and now lives in Palermo. Another boy, Mouhamadou Sazll, plays the role onstage.

The project was hatched in late 2017, when the theater asked Einaudi and Palermo-born film and stage director Roberto Andò to come up with an opera about migration.

In an interview, Andò described the work as a eulogy, of sorts, for “the Europe that was and isn’t anymore. A world that we hoped had more strength and instead risks faltering.”

At one point, the chorus recalls the time, not so many decades ago, when “Europe tore itself apart,” with “aerial bombing, fighting in the streets, and people fleeing through the night, hungry, cold, seeking refuge.”

“People have a habit of settling and forgetting” said Toibin, who is working on a novel about German exiles during World War II, when untold numbers of people were also displaced. “I wanted people to think about that,” he said.

Francesco Giambrone, superintendent of the Teatro Massimo, said that the opera was a natural fit for Palermo, which has remained an open, hospitable city under the guidance of Mayor Leoluca Orlando, a dominant figure in local politics for the past 30 years. This year, Orlando refused to implement some of the hard-line anti-immigrant policies instituted by the previous Italian government.

The opera also fit into the Teatro Massimo’s vision of what an opera theater can be today. “It’s a theater that accepts the responsibility of interpreting the urgencies of the community, and in so doing helps the community to grow,” Giambrone said during an interview at the theater last month. Migration, he said, is one of the “most fundamental, global themes of the times, which in Palermo resonates especially profoundly, because the city is a port of hospitality. ”

A recent outreach program co-produced with the Rome Opera has taken performances out of the opera house and onto the streets, sometimes by way of a traveling show performed on the back of a truck, or by staging productions in low-income neighborhoods whose residents don’t tend to go to the opera much, if ever. For the past two summers, the Massimo has brought productions to the down-at-heel Danisinni quarter of Palermo, and what could have been a one-off experience has instead become a monthslong project including the creation of a choir of local residents to perform in the shows. This year, they sang in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola.”

“The theater should not be elitist,” said Giambrone, who raised eyebrows years ago when he encouraged patrons to come to the opera dressed casually. “We want to express a different model of theater in tune with the community.”

“Winter Journey” is Einaudi’s first attempt at composing an opera, though he has previously worked on projects that incorporate theater and dance. “I wanted it to be as real as possible,” without becoming rhetorical, he said. With Toibin, he added, he “found a line that is expressive of a sober, interior sentiment.”

Unlike many operas that play on the Teatro Massimo’s stage, “Winter Journey” doesn’t end heroically or tragically — but with uncertainty. A happy ending, Toibin said, “would have been too simple and would have falsified the picture.”

A Migrant's Tragic Journey to Europe. It's Not on the News, It's Opera.

PALERMO, Sicily — Off the coast of Sicily, a rickety boat of migrants is in distress. Tossed by waves and drenched, women and children scream as a voice barks, “Jump and swim!” They do, but — as history shows — not everyone will make it.

But its return to the Pitti on Friday, 75 years after a German soldier made off with the artwork, was a ticker-tape event attended by a flotilla of dignitaries including three ministers, one cardinal, Florence’s mayor and various diplomats and high-ranking military police generals.

“Today we render justice to history,” said Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Galleries and who is also responsible for the Pitti Palace. The return of the painting was “a very important recovery,” he said, adding that he hoped it would lead to the restitution of other works of looted art that were still missing from museum collections.

Enzo Moavero Milanesi, Italy’s foreign minister, spoke during the ceremony of the “team effort” that had led to its return, involving German and Italian diplomats, justice and culture ministry officials and military officers assigned to Italy’s art crimes squad.

A special shout out was given to Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, who backed Italy’s efforts to retrieve the painting from the heirs of the soldier who took it.

The soldier may not even have known of the painting’s true value. Moavero cited a July 1944 letter that the soldier had written to his wife in the city of Halle, later part of East Germany, to say that he was sending her a package with a “pretty painting” that would look good in a gold frame.

Efforts to find the work after the war had ground to a halt, until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the soldier’s heirs made the first of several overtures to Italian officials, as well as a London auction house, to sell the painting back. When a lawyer for the family tried to negotiate a sale to the Uffizi last year, prosecutors in Florence initiated an investigation to determine whether the request could be construed as extortion.

Pressure on the family was ratcheted up considerably in January, when Schmidt began an attention-grabbing media and online campaign demanding the painting’s return. He hung a black and white photo of the painting in its original spot, with the word “stolen” in various languages blazoned around the frame. “Eike ignited the final acceleration,” Moavero said.

The painting was exhibited for the first time in Florence in 1824, when the Grand Duke Leopold II of Hapsburg-Lorraine bought it to hang alongside other still lifes for a newly created gallery in the Pitti Palace.

It hung for over a century in the so-called Room of the Putti, and was moved when the palace was evacuated during World War II and its artworks were transferred for safekeeping to various villas near the city. “Vase of Flowers” disappeared from public records in 1944 when German soldiers shipped artwork northward, as the Allies advanced.

Culture Minister Alberto Bonisoli said Friday that Italy was involved in other negotiations to retrieve artifacts it claims were stolen, including a bronze statue that is a centerpiece of the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. But in the case of “Vase of Flowers,” the negotiations had been particularly tricky, because the work had been in private hands, and Italy’s legal claims were inadmissible under German law. “It wasn’t so simple to get it back,” he said.

After traveling from Germany with Maas and his entourage on Friday, the painting was solemnly unveiled at the ceremony in the grandiose Stucco Hall of the Pitti Palace.

To celebrate its return, the painting has been hung in the so-called Music Room, and will later be returned to its original spot in the Room of the Putti.

“A museum without its works of art is like a vase without flowers,” Maas said Friday. “We can’t say that the Uffizi was empty, but there was something missing, a void. Today we are here to fill that void.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/italy-looted-painting.html" id="dc8f769d-4776-3e5f-ade4-e50705f8c9a2">The New York Times</a>.

FLORENCE, Italy — Compared to showier works in Florence’s Pitti Palace — paintings by Caravaggio, Raphael, and Titian — the small “Vase of Flowers” by Jan van Huysum might barely earn a second glance, even if the artist was among the most popular still-life artists working in the Netherlands in the 18th century.

75 Years After World War II Theft, a Painting Returns to Italy

<h1>MILAN — It used to be, and not so long ago, that August’s torridness bested Italians’ attempts at keeping cool in the heat-retaining concrete and stone of their cities. Factories and shops would shut their doors, and mass migrations to the seashore, or toward limpid mountain air, left cities with a faintly post-apocalyptic feeling.</h1>

Those unlucky enough to be left behind foraged for food, pharmacies or the air-conditioned relief of the rare movie theater that had not closed for the summer.

Italy’s premier opera theater, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, used to take an extra-long bow, lowering its curtain in July only to raise it with the pomp and circumstance of its celebrated and celebrity-filled Dec. 7 premiere (there was always a fall concert season, but it is not the same thing).

The frenetic tempo of modern life has not spared Italy. Or La Scala, where the opera season has been considerably lengthened, particularly after a three-year high-tech upgrade 15 years ago.

“Things have changed from a few years ago, when there was a real pause, awaiting Dec. 7,” Stefania Cavallin, one of the theater’s three chief stage designers, said in an interview at the theater this month. “But then we began with a small fall season that became increasingly important. Now it’s a continuous cycle.”

Her production team — as well as other employees of La Scala — still gets a three-week break in August, she said. “But we already prepare the work that will go onstage when the theater reopens” in September, she added.

Nowadays, La Scala’s playbill has grown from the eight or nine operas staged in a typical season 20 years ago to around 15, of which nine or 10 are new or co-productions. Of the six ballets, about half are new, said Franco Malgrande, La Scala’s stage engineer. “It’s a very tight production,” and that translates into “a considerably greater offer for the public.”

Malgrande added that even when the season ended, around the third week of July, “it doesn’t mean our activity stops.” The rare period when the stage is free of sets, he added, “is when all the maintenance takes place, of the machinery and of the stage mechanics,” a round-the-clock endeavor because of the shorter summer break. Preparations then begin for the fall operas, usually the theater’s own productions (in September and October, Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore.”)

La Scala did not become Italy’s most famed theater overnight. It worked for it.

In the 1950s, Malgrande said, it built its own external workshops for costume and set design and construction (previously, because they were mostly painted backdrops, opera sets were created in a large hall above the main auditorium). Now, the workshops occupy a 215,000-square-foot facility, the former Ansaldo steel plants in what was once an industrial area of Milan, and employ about 150 artisans.

“They work frenetically; it’s a factory,” Malgrande said cheerfully. From sets to designs to stage objects, “we can reproduce anything, any object in the world, old, new, ancient,” he said. And the in-house skills ensure that high-quality productions are passed on to new generations, who train inside the theater. “There’s a wealth of experience in La Scala,” he said.

Though Italy has 14 opera foundations, “no other theater has such structured workshops,” Cavallin echoed.

Over at the Ansaldo facility on a muggy afternoon this month, set builders were putting the finishing touches on a boat for “Le Corsaire” and crafting a believable Persian rug from stencils and paint for an upcoming production of “Julius Caesar,” while in another area, gigantic musical instruments for Salieri’s “Prima la musica e poi le parole,” part of a double bill with Woody Allen’s staging of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” were works in progress.

The workshops will be active until the end of July before a short August hiatus.

“August is still a problem in Italy because many of our suppliers shut down, so it makes little sense for us to remain open,” Cavallin said.

A group of visitors gathered on the walkway above the main workshop. Guided tours are given twice a week.

In the costume department, Rita Citterio, who oversees the theater’s costume storage, gave a brief tour of her own: a showcase of historic costumes from past productions of operas on this year’s playbill, including those from a 1954-55 “L’elisir d’amore” by Franco Zeffirelli and Gabriella Pescucci’s costumes for the 1997-98 “Manon Lescaut.” Next season, Dolce &amp; Gabbana will debut as costume designers at La Scala for Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera.”

In its warehouse, La Scala has about 60,000 costumes dating from 1911. Each year, 3,000 to 4,000 more are added. “Space is a big problem,” Citterio said, laughing. “When we first came here, I never imagined we’d run out of room, but since the seasons have gotten longer it’s changed a lot.”

La Scala’s seamstresses split their skill sets. Some work on and behind the stage, while others create the costumes, which have their own challenges.

“We generally say that one opera is better than 100 ballets, which are very complicated from the point of view of the costume, because clearly the ballet dancer uses the costume, it can’t get in the way of movement,” said Cinzia Rosselli, head of dressmaking. “For an opera singer, the most important thing is the throat and the chest area; for a dancer it’s all important, from the tip of their big toe to the top of their head.”

The ballet company has the most demanding summer schedule, using the days off to tour. This August it will travel to Beijing, with La Scala’s own productions of “Giselle” and “Le Corsaire.”

“They are two opposite productions; one presents the company in its virtuosity and brilliance, and ‘Giselle’ is romantic, part of tradition,” said the ballet director, Frédéric Olivieri.

As he spoke, stagehands were packing up crates with sets, costumes, lighting, makeup and other needs for the two productions, which would head to Beijing by ship, then by train.

A ballet master would also head there ahead of the company to rehearse with local children — students at a Chinese dance academy — for one of the scenes in “Le Corsaire.” “Touring is interesting because there is always a cultural exchange,” Olivieri said.

Back in Milan, the 2019-20 ballet season will be inaugurated with a coproduction with the Vienna State Ballet of “Sylvia,” choreographed by its director, Manuel Legris. Olivieri was enthusiastic: “It’s very rare to add a new classical ballet to the repertoire.”

In the heat of August, as the stagehands work backstage, another crew will be working in the auditorium, where the gigantic chandelier will be lowered from the ceiling, as it is every year, to be cleaned. This summer, work will begin to improve the acoustics of La Scala’s boxes, removing the padding that is currently on the walls to apply tapestry directly to the drywall. The first order will be tackled this year, the first of a three-year project.

And then, even as operas and ballets rotate on the calendar, La Scala will prepare for its Dec. 7 premiere.

“It remains an opening in grand style; for anyone who works at La Scala it remains the key date, it is untouchable,” said Cavallin, the stage designer.

“It is a very heartfelt occasion,” Malgrande chimed in.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/arts/la-scala-summer-milan.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

La Scala May Slow Down in Summer, but the Show Goes On

Those unlucky enough to be left behind foraged for food, pharmacies or the air-conditioned relief of the rare movie theater that had not closed for the summer.

La Scala may slow down in summer, but the show goes on

But three lesser-known Italian museums have snagged two prized da Vinci paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Hermitage will lend a “Madonna and Child” painting known as the Benois Madonna to a municipal museum in Fabriano, a medieval town in the Marche region, to coincide with a UNESCO conference in June. After being on view for a month there, the painting will be exhibited for most of July at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. (That stop came in exchange for a work by Piero della Francesca lent to the Hermitage for a show earlier this year.)

The Hermitage will lend another painting, known as the Litta Madonna, to the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, to be the centerpiece of a show on da Vinci’s Milanese circle that will open in November.

Cities around the world are commemorating the anniversary of Leonardo’s death, on May 2, 1519, with exhibitions, conferences and other events, including a private auction this fall of the first vintage made from a Milanese vineyard that once belonged to da Vinci.

Prolific as da Vinci was in his writings, fewer than 30 paintings have been attached to his name, and about half of those have not been universally accepted as his autograph, raising the cachet of exhibiting an authentic masterpiece this year. Museums that own da Vincis have been ardently wooed to temporarily part with their masterpieces, with varying results. The Vatican Museums, for example, will lend “St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness,” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition opening July 15, but the Uffizi Gallery of Florence has denied requests for its three da Vincis because they are too fragile to travel.

Lara Anniboletti, a spokeswoman for the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, said the museum wanted to “offer its own contribution” to the da Vinci commemorations. “It made sense to ask the Hermitage for a work that would relate to this important event,” she said.

For the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the loan of the Litta Madonna is a bit of a homecoming: The Hermitage bought the painting in 1865, from the collection of Count Antonio Litta. Attribution of the work to da Vinci has not been unanimous, and at the Poldi Pezzoli, it will be shown alongside another work from the Litta collection, a “Virgin and Child” by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, an artist who worked in da Vinci’s Milanese studio and who has been identified by some experts as the Litta Madonna’s possible author.

Da Vinci spent his final years in France, which is why many of his paintings ended up in the Louvre. But he worked in Milan for 20 years — when he painted the Litta Madonna — and left a profound mark on the city. The Poldi Pezzoli exhibition will also include paintings and drawings by the artists in his circle.

“We have a nucleus of works by Leonardo’s followers, and we wanted to investigate this group of artists who worked closely with him during his Milanese period, carrying out his ideas, using his techniques,” said Andrea di Lorenzo, the museum’s conservator. “It was a time of great experimentation.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="17adbb61-f05e-3da9-a28f-e033d726d467" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/arts/design/leonardo-da-vinci-500th-anniversary.html">The New York Times</a>.

Italian museums secure Leonardo da Vinci works for 500th-anniversary shows

ROME — The Louvre Museum’s much-hyped Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, which opens in October, is expected to outshine other events to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death this year.

They planned the heist at the church, Santa Maria Maddalena for lunchtime, when the parish priest was sure to be out. They worked quickly, smashing the showcase protecting the 17th-century work with a hammer, before jumping into a getaway car (a white Peugeot, according to Italian news media reports) that screeched out of town. The speeding car attracted the attention of a resident, who saw that the church door was wide open (unusually so), and raised the alarm.

What the thieves didn’t know was that the painting was a copy that had been substituted for the original artwork a few weeks earlier, after the carabinieri, Italy’s military police, were tipped off that burglars had their sights set on the Brueghel.

The only people besides the carabinieri who knew about the substitution, were the priest of the church and the local mayor, and in the hours after the theft, they pretended to be distraught.

“We had sworn to the carabinieri to keep mum, so at first I had to act like I was desperate and fake grief over the loss,” said Daniele Montebello, the mayor of Castelnuovo Magra, the town in Liguria where this all took place.

The carabinieri pulled off a “brilliant operation,” Montebello said, adding, in an interview Thursday, “I don’t want to even think about the consequences had they not switched the paintings.”

News that the painting was a copy was leaked to the news media Wednesday night.

Rev. Alessandro Chiantaretto, the priest of Santa Maria Maddalena, said he believed the thieves “must have studied my habits,” so they knew when to strike. At lunchtime, he often brought communion to housebound parishioners he explained in a telephone interview.

Officials for the carabinieri declined to comment on the case because the investigation is continuing.

The work is very similar to another by Brueghel the Younger, which bears the same name and is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

According to the municipal website, “The Crucifixion” — painted in oil on five oak panels — was itself a copy of sorts of a now lost work by the same name painted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the artist’s father. A wealthy local family donated it to the church.

Thieves had successfully stolen the painting from the church in 1981, but the police recovered it a few months later.

The church has a closed-circuit camera system as well as an alarm system. It was not clear whether the alarm went off.

Chiantaretto said the church usually remained open all day, so visitors could pray or appreciate its artworks, including another depiction of Christ’s crucifixion once attributed to Anthony van Dyck (it was later revealed to be the work of a follower). The theft, he feared, would force him to limit access. “When churches are like museums, you either have staff or volunteers, or you close them,” he said.

Montebello said he didn’t know whether the thieves had been identified, but said the carabinieri told him that it was “only a matter of time.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/design/brueghel-crucifixion-painting-stolen.html" id="500e7d68-9873-347a-aaf4-78ba627a134e">The New York Times</a>.

ROME — The thieves who took “The Crucifixion,” a painting by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger, from a church in a Northern Italian town on Wednesday, knew what they were doing.

Thieves Trying to Steal Precious Painting Get Worthless Copy

Fortunately, his heirs never carried out those orders. But for years, scholars have complained that for all the access they had to them, those pages might as well have been lost. Locked as they were in a trunk kept at the composer’s home in Sant’Agata, in northern Italy, only select specialists were allowed to peruse them, mostly at the discretion of Verdi’s heirs.

Academics grumbled that requests to study the papers went unanswered. “It was intolerable that scholars couldn’t easily get their hands on the material,” said Sandro Cappelletto, editor of Studi Verdiani, the journal of the National Institute of Verdi Studies. “We had access to Rossini’s papers, Bellini’s papers. Why should 5,000 of Verdi’s papers remain unread?”

For Verdi aficionados, the trunk — made in Chicago by Marshall Field &amp; Co. at the end of the 19th century — became a sort of holy grail. Rumors about its contents have been the stuff of legend.

But Tuesday, two years after the trunk was transferred by Italy’s Ministry of Culture from the Verdi villa to the state archive in the nearby city of Parma, at least some of those speculations will be laid to rest. Its contents are finally being made public.

Locked inside the trunk were drafts and sketches for 12 operas written over nearly half a century, from “Luisa Miller” to “Falstaff,” as well as for works like the Requiem and “Four Sacred Pieces.” They have been cataloged and digitized and will be made accessible to scholars. Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, a musicologist who examined the contents, described the experience as getting a firsthand look into “the workshop of the composer.”

The trunk contained more than 5,400 pages, around 600 of which are blank: a cornucopia of musical musings, stage directions, afterthoughts and reconsiderations, offering a glimpse into Verdi’s creative process at work “from the very first compositional gesture, where ideas are still fragmentary,” said Pellegrini, who became involved with the project when she was scientific director of the Verdi Institute.

There are hundreds of pages related to “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff,” for example — works whose “genesis has never been completely examined,” Pellegrini said. The sketches are central to understanding Verdi’s compositional process, she added. Various versions of Iago’s famous “Credo” suggest that it was pondered “arduously,” she said, while “Falstaff” fans will be intrigued by drafts Verdi discarded, like the first version of the opera’s fugue finale.

One page, she said, included the scribblings of “an aged Verdi inscribing a passage from the Gospel.” Beyond music, she added, “there’s a life that emerges” from the papers, a lens into the composer’s humanity.

They also reflect the passage of time. In the sketches for “Luisa Miller,” which premiered in 1849, Verdi’s handwriting is the “very ordered” writing of a young man, Pellegrini said, but it becomes “much looser” in the sketches for “Falstaff,” which had its premiere 44 years later. Many of the pages, she added, are difficult to read: “They’re mostly working drafts and sketches,” not intended for posterity.

The varying quality of the paper — including porous, less valuable paper that Verdi probably used for initial drafts and more expensive sheets on which he jotted fuller musical sketches — could assist scholars in establishing a timeline of Verdi’s thoughts. “It’s an incredibly important” cache of documents, Cappelletto, the Studi Verdiani editor, said, which will be “essential for future critical editions.”

Verdi’s heirs, the Carrara Verdi family, are less enthusiastic about the trunk’s notoriety, and even less so about the removal from the villa by the Culture Ministry of another cache of documents — around 24,000, including letters and sundry papers — after experts determined that the family was not preserving them correctly. Those papers are now being held in sealed boxes at the state archive in Parma.

The Verdi villa was never widely open, but scholars complained that under the family’s stewardship, it was far too difficult to access documents — despite the fact that Verdi’s papers were declared of public interest in 2008, and as such had to be made publicly available. The Culture Ministry took the trunk from the villa in January 2017, partly in response to the complaints.

There is no substitute for original documents, said Fabrizio Della Seta, a professor of music at the University of Pavia in Cremona, who oversaw the critical edition of “La Traviata” 20 years ago. Access is “indispensable,” he said, and “must be guaranteed.”

Angiolo Carrara Verdi, one of the composer’s heirs and the Villa Verdi’s current caretaker, declined to be interviewed. Officials at the Culture Ministry who oversaw the transfer of the papers, as well as ministry officials at local archives, also declined to comment.

Francesco Izzo, general editor of the critical edition of Verdi’s works, noted that despite the myth surrounding the trunk, its contents hadn’t been a complete mystery. A number of musicologists and scholars have studied individual folders, and, in 2015, Classic Voice, an Italian music magazine that campaigned for access to the documents, published a summary of the contents.

“We already had a fairly clear sense of the contents of this trunk,” Izzo said. But, he added, “we can now build and improve our knowledge even further.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/arts/music/verdi-papers-italy.html" id="c0603fe2-978f-3d94-a535-cf1b726318d7">The New York Times</a>.

ROME — While working on “Otello” and “Falstaff,” his final two operas, composer Giuseppe Verdi tucked dozens of pages of musical drafts and sketches into folders, scribbling on their covers: “Burn these papers.”

5,000 Pages of Verdi's Drafts, Long Hidden, Will Be Made Public

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