The day Old Mona went on holiday.

On this day in 1911, a few people in Paris had that horrible sick feeling you get when something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

The Mona Lisa was not on the wall. Not was she with the photographers that were supposed to have her. She was gone and no one knew how or who took her.

You all know the painting. If you don't I suggest you use Google now before all of the gods strike you down. The mysterious portrait of someone who might possibly have been a Noble Woman, possibly a Normal Woman or possibly a Whore painted by one Leonardo Da Vinci somewhere around 1503- 1506. We will never actually know who the subject was and why the heck she's smiling like that (seriously, that smile worries me), but that's not really important. What's important is just how ridiculously simple she was to steal.

In 1911 there was security and The Louvre had plenty of it. But somehow Mona went walkabout under everybody's noses. One might she was there and the next morning she wasn't. Picasso was implicated by Apollinaire in the theft along with half the cat-burgling population of Paris. Alas, no-cigar. Mona rained in the wind for two years before the real culprit was discovered.

It turns out that an Italian employee of The Louvre was one of those folks who thought that everything had its rightful place in the world and he believed that Mona's rightful place was in Italy, not France. So one day he decoded to hide in a broom cupboard until the museum closed, shove the surprisingly petit Mona under his jacket and leave after closing. Genius. Unfortunately, due to the painting's fame he never would have got away with it, but he did manage to hide her in his apartment for two years before getting impatient and trying to sell her to museum in Florence. Vincenzo Peruggia served a whopping six months for the theft and Mona returned to her home on the wall of The Louvre in 1913 ready and waiting for Nat King Cole to sing about.