Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Perugia bided his time.
He waited until November 1913 to make a move.
He smuggled it then to Italy, in a trunk.
and he holed himself up in a hotel in Florence, where he contacted an art dealer called Alfredo Geri and told him he had the Mona Lisa.
Geri then contacted Giovanni Poggi, who was director of the city's Uffizi gallery.
Through that connection, Perugia offered the Mona Lisa to the Uffizi for 500,000 lira.
The Uffizi played along and after Perugia had dropped the painting off at the museum, he returned to his hotel room where the police arrived and arrested him.
Perugia told the police that he'd stolen the Mona Lisa not for personal gain but as an act of patriotism.
in order to return it to its rightful home in Italy, because he believed that Napoleon Bonaparte had seized it from Italy and taken it to France.
Which, of course, was wrong, because Leonardo had taken it to France.
But that was Perugia's defence.
Unfortunately, the wider evidence shows that he hadn't really done it as a patriotic thing.
He'd done it because he hoped to sell it to dealers in other countries.
And he'd even written to his family, telling them he was about to come into a large amount of money.
There are stories that Perugia pulled off the original theft with help from accomplices.
But by the time the police had done all the interviews, it was only Perugia who was tried for it.
As the police investigations widened, they also found out that Perugia had connections in the criminal underworld.
Nevertheless, Italy, like many European countries at the time, was patriotic and people were broadly sympathetic to Perugia's story.
As a result, when he came up for trial, he was sentenced to only one year and 15 days imprisonment.
And even that got reduced to seven months and nine days, and he was in fact released immediately for the time he'd already served.
Showing 221–240 of 436 · page 12 of 22
← Previous
Next →