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## The Man in the White Smock
Vincenzo Peruggia was born on October 8, 1881, in Dumenza, a small Alpine village in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, near the Swiss border. He trained as a decorator and glazier, served in the Italian military, and moved to Paris in 1908 at the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, as many Italian workers did in that era, following the demand for skilled labor in the expanding city.
He was unremarkable by most measures. He worked at various jobs around Paris. He was not educated in art history or in the particular significance of the painting he would eventually steal. By his own later account, he knew the Mona Lisa the way a worker knows a fixture in a building where he has had a job: as an object he had encountered during the course of his employment.
In 1908 or early 1909, Peruggia worked briefly at the Louvre as part of a maintenance crew. The specific work he did during that period became, later, one of the most discussed details of the case. He had been part of a crew that installed glass protective cases on a number of the museum’s paintings, including the Mona Lisa. This work required him to handle the case and become familiar with its construction. He knew how the case was mounted. He knew the room.
After that period of Louvre employment ended, he continued working in Paris in various capacities. He was, by the time of the theft, living in a small apartment in the city, working as a decorator and painter, and by all outward appearances an ordinary Italian laborer in a city with a large Italian immigrant population.