ABSTRACT
In the days leading up to Christmas 1978, unbeknownst to Paola Modiano Ferrari di Valbona, her seventh floor apartment in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter was being scrutinized by thieves. On Christmas Eve, seventy-one-year-old Paola had vacated her apartment on 17, rue du Petit Pont; her most valuable possession, The Miracle of St Anthony (Il miracolo di Sant’ Antonio, oil on canvas, 1754/6) painting by Venetian Rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, hung on her bedroom wall. She had inherited the work of art from her father, Jewish industrialist Ettore Modiano, following his death twenty-three years prior. On acquiring it in London in 1929, he had imported it to Italy, under temporary import regime, and it joined the family art collection in Bologna.
