History

It’s a warm morning on August 22, 1911, when a French copyist arrives at the most famous museum in the world, hoping to study the most famous painting ever made. For over four centuries, that painting had been on quite a journey -traveling from the Florence of the Renaissance, through the opulent halls of French kings, into Napoleon’s private bedroom, and finally, to the most important Paris’s museum. But on the morning of August 22, 1911, the world’s most famous painting is nowhere to be found. Only the frame remains...

Just a year earlier, after a string of vandalism incidents, the museum had begun installing protective glass over its artworks. The contract was awarded to a Parisian glassmaker named Monsieur Gobier. Among his workers was a thin Italian house painter named Vincenzo Peruggia.

Vincenzo Peruggia wasn’t the kind of man you’d notice in a crowd. Rejected from the Italian army for his frail build, he had followed in the footsteps of many fellow Italians and migrated to France, scraping by as a painter and decorator. One of his employers was Monsieur Gobier. One of his tasks: handling the frames at the Louvre. 

And it was in a small office within the Louvre, five months before the Mona Lisa vanished, that Vincenzo stumbled upon a random book on a shelf. Inside was a satirical illustration—a line of carts loaded with stolen Italian artworks, plundered by Napoleon and hauled off to the Louvre. Something ignited inside him. Nationalist fervor was swelling across Europe - World War I  was upon us, and the fire of nationalism would soon overwhelm Europe. “If only I could bring just one back to Italy,” Vincenzo thought. And which one, if not the most iconic of them all? What he didn’t was that the painting hadn’t been stolen: it was delivered personally by Leonardo da Vinci to the King of France Francis I in 1516. But Vincenzo could not have known this: as often happened in those days, his education had stopped at the third grade.

As we said, Peruggia wasn’t the kind of man you’d notice in a crowd - which is exactly why nobody noticed him on the morning of August 21, 1911, when he slipped through a service door at the Louvre. Wearing a white smock like the museum staff, he wandered through empty corridors - it was Monday, the museum's day off. He walked into the Salon Carré, watched only by the inscrutable gaze of a woman who had lived four hundred years before. He removed the painting from the wall, unscrewed the frame, and walked out into the Paris streets with the Mona Lisa tucked under his arm covering it whit his jacket. 

For two years, the most famous painting in the world sits in a humble storeroom next to a cramped little room belonging to a house painter. Two years pass before Peruggia finally decides it’s time to bring Monna Lisa back to her birthplace. On December 10, 1913, he checks into room number 20 of a small hotel on Via Panzani n°2 in Florence. There, he meets with an art dealer and offers to sell him the Mona Lisa for 500.000 lire. But he had one condition: the painting must remain in Florence, at the Uffizi Gallery. The dealer contacts the authorities, and Peruggia is immediately arrested.

In a way, Peruggia’s dream comes true. Before it’s returned to France, the Mona Lisa is displayed at the Uffizi; on the morning of December 14th, 1913, more than 30,000 Florentines line up to see her. Peruggia is sentenced to a year in prison, but the “heist of the century” has won over the hearts of the Italian people, and he’s released after just seven months. He will return home a hero, get married, and eventually will move back to Paris under a false name. On his 44th birthday, he will die suddenly, in the arms of his young daughter Celestina.

... for the past five centuries, the Mona Lisa - La Gioconda - has lived far from the city where her creator, Leonardo da Vinci, gave her the gift of eternal life. Except for those few cold winter days in 1913, when she breathed again the air of Florence, from the window of room number 20 in a hotel just steps from the Duomo.

That hotel was called Albergo Tripoli. A century later, it was lovingly restored by a family of architects passionate about art history. Today, the incredible story of the Mona Lisa lives on at Hotel The Frame.