Antonello da Messina painted the Italian Ferragosto, five centuries later

It took Antonello da Messina, a Sicilian genius – and therefore a doubly Italian genius – to finally succeed in showing us Ferragosto. Many had tried before, with mixed results. Risi and Carlo Verdone’s films had tried, and sociologists had tried too, though they cannot describe languor; they merely measure it. No one had quite succeeded, because Ferragosto is an intangible subject, a temperature of the Italian soul, and to capture it on a surface, a painter was needed. Antonello waited five hundred and fifty years, then on the evening of 15 August – that is, last Saturday – he created the work. It was stolen. Four paintings disappeared from a museum with four security guards on duty, who failed to notice them despite the CCTV cameras being on – knock knock, the police are here: four paintings have been stolen – because the mid-August lethargy does not close our eyes, but leaves them open and revokes their mandate; it is the certainty, lasting a whole day, that 15 August will keep history at bay on our behalf and that nothing can happen.

The cities are as deserted as they were before the bombings, and the few sick, fools or defeatists who remain there eke out a meagre existence amongst boarded-up shops, closed restaurants and offices where a skeleton staff treats them with languid or angry condescension. The CGIA in Mestre has calculated the cost of this lethargy: twenty billion in lost output in August, every year. In August 2004, Sergio Marchionne wandered around the Fiat offices without finding a soul and realised that here, things shut down without actually closing: ‘On holiday… but from what?’. Only Italy has turned the summer break into a ritual of total synchronisation. The only institutions still operating on Ferragosto are the traffic bulletin and the on-duty chemist’s, the two supreme authorities of a country that, for twenty-four hours, renounces the right to govern itself. Even murders, fits of madness, family quarrels, stabbings and the summer underworld—which brims with biochemical aggression on Ferragosto—come to a halt. A form of upright slumber. Even the theft, it must be said, on 15 August in Messina, was carried out according to schedule. Of the five panels of the polyptych, the thieves took only three: they abandoned the other two in the street. A job left half-done, like a file left on the desk on a Friday afternoon, with the vague idea that it might (perhaps) be dealt with on Monday morning. All things considered, it was the laziest theft in the history of Italian stolen goods, and indeed the police now report that ‘they weren’t even professionals’ – a job that gave up halfway through, just like the gaze of the museum’s custodians.

The next day, as always happens, Italy woke up with a start, as usual too late. The President of the Sicilian Region – whose museums are often closed, such as the historic one in Gela – spoke of an intolerable affront to cultural heritage, whilst also pointing out that the alarm and CCTV had functioned as normal; which, in the lexicon of an Italian August, confirms that everything was switched on and no one was watching. Antonello would have understood. No painter has ever captured languor with such precision: those half-closed eyes, those lips suspended between a thought, a half-smile and the promise of tomorrow. Being taken away on a day of general lethargy was his final stroke. Perfect, needless to say, for a still from a film by Pietro Germi, who, when it came to Sicily and Sicilians, knew how to explain Italians: “Sicily is Italy twice over; all Italians are Sicilians, and Sicilians are Sicilians even more so”. A whole temperature of the soul.