The lesson the Louvre and other museums drew from this was not that sophisticated criminals were capable of sophisticated thefts; it was that any sufficiently determined person with inside knowledge and minimal planning could remove an accessible object from an institution that had not been designed with theft prevention as a primary consideration.
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## The Crowds That Came
The human response to the Mona Lisa’s recovery — in Florence, in Rome, and after its return to the Louvre — was quantitatively different from anything the painting had previously experienced.
The figure of 30,000 visitors to see the recovered painting in Florence, reported in the *New York Times*, represents a specific and significant moment: the first time the Mona Lisa had been displayed in Italy since Leonardo left for France in 1516. For the visitors who came, this was not simply an opportunity to see a great painting. It was an opportunity to participate in what felt, after two and a half years of absence and anxiety, like a cultural homecoming — even if the painting would shortly be taken away again to France.
The Uffizi in Florence was an appropriate venue for the display. As the institution that housed Florence’s greatest collection of Renaissance painting — Botticelli’s *Primavera* and *Birth of Venus*, works by Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio — it was the natural home for a temporary display of the painting that represented, in the minds of many, the pinnacle of Florentine Renaissance achievement. That Poggi, its director, had authenticated the painting made the institutional connection concrete.