At the Scuderie del Quirinale the adventure of the masterpieces saved from the Nazis is told

It took hours to get that enormous altarpiece in the cathedral of Fondi out of the bombed-out church, to get it through that grating. Luckily that time there was a local volunteer to lend a hand to Emilio Lavagnino, who also lent him the truck. This time it would have been hard to transport the Annunciation by Cristoforo Scacco, a masterpiece dated 1499 and then destined to return to the Lazio town, on the roof of his Topolino aboard which, with mad and extremely desperate and yet extremely lucid and methodical work, he had been patrolling the churches and villages of Lazio for months: in search of art treasures, above all sacred (there were no museums there), to be cataloged and hide. Palma Bucarelli, then the young director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and destined to become one of the key figures in the evolution of artistic and museum taste in Italy, had lent him three rubbers to get that battered Mickey going. She too participated in the same enterprise. There was everything to hide in the Vatican: the only refuge at that point, by which time Italy had become a land of occupation and looting for the Nazis. How he managed to bring the great Pala Scacco to the Vatican without being caught by the Nazis, there near Anzio in 1943, is a mystery, or rather a novel. In fact, it would be a movie story.