Ignorant Peasants Assault Photographer

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7062, 23 January 1933, Page 10

Ignorant Peasants Assault Photographer

THOUGHT PAINTING WAS BEING STOLEN

ROME. 1 Even in the smallest villages Italians have a true love for the works of art and antiquities which have been handed down from generation to generation. This feeling may perhaps bo partly accounted for by the fact that such ■antique objects often attract visits from tourists and therefore help to bolster up trade, but it cannot bo entirely explained by such commercial considerations. Tho latest manifestation of this sentiment occurred in the tiny villago of Fratticciola Selvatiica near Perugia, the population of which, though composed largely of poor and almost illiterate peasants, attacked and soverely ibeat a harmless-looking individual who was standing in the villago church behind a camera mounted on a tripod, focussing lit on the painting of the Madonna dellc Grazie by Fioronzo di Lorenzo. Tho villagers apparently feared that ho had come to remove tho precious painting, the apple of the eye of eveTy true inhabitant of Fratticciola Selvatica, to tho museum in Perugia It was only several hours later that he was . able to explain through his bandages, in a hospital, that ho merely wished to take a photograph of the painting to illustrate a book about Fioronzo di Lorenzo.