Thieves used Ferragosto festivities as cover to steal four works by the Renaissance master from a Messina museum; investigators believe an insider may have guided the two-minute heist.Italian police are hunting for a gang of art thieves who stole four works by the Sicilian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina from a museum in Messina during Ferragosto celebrations.  Two robbers wearing full-face helmets broke into the Museo Regionale di Messina on the evening of 15 August while the city was absorbed in the Vara procession, a votive float parade marking the Assumption that draws thousands of spectators each year.   Security footage reviewed by investigators shows the pair entering through a side door, pulling five wooden panels from the Polittico di San Gregorio off the wall, forcing open an armoured display case to seize a small double-sided panel, and leaving by the same door. The entire operation, coordinated with two accomplices waiting outside, lasted between two and three minutes.   The gang abandoned two of the five altarpiece panels, depicting St Benedict and St Gregory, on a low wall outside the museum - possibly due to the presence of passersby - ultimately making off with three panels from the altarpiece and the separate double-sided work.   Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–1479) was a Sicilian painter of the Early Italian Renaissance, renowned for pioneering the use of oil paint in Italy and blending Flemish, Netherlandish realism with Italian, Venetian structure.The stolen Polittico di San Gregorio (1473) was originally a six-panel altarpiece painted for the Monastero di San Gregorio, a monastery destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake; its surviving panels have since been held at the museum. The other stolen piece is a small double-sided panel showing the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan friar on one side and Christ on the other, part of the Wilhelm Soldan collection bought from Christie's by the Sicilian region in 2003.Detectives tracked the getaway van through CCTV along its route from Viale Annunziata before losing sight of it in an area without surveillance cameras. Investigators are now trying to identify a suspected inside contact who may have carried out reconnaissance beforehand, alongside a review of mobile phone activity in the area at the time.Suspicion has also fallen on the museum's security arrangements. According to Italian media reports, the four guards on duty that night were away from the monitoring room when the alarm sounded, and none contacted emergency services or carried out a check afterwards; investigators have questioned all four, though the circumstances remain unconfirmed. The museum's alarm system was reportedly around 25 years old and not directly linked to police control rooms.Messina's mayor, Federico Basile, and the museum's director, Marisa Mercurio, both stressed the cultural significance of the stolen works to the city, which is Antonello da Messina's birthplace. Italy's culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, expressed "dismay and regret" over the theft.Investigators believe the works were likely stolen to order, given the near impossibility of selling such recognisable paintings on the open market, and have not ruled out a non-Sicilian or foreign gang specialising in this kind of raid. Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, drew a comparison with the unsolved 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston, suggesting the thieves exploited the public's focus on the Vara procession in the same way the Boston gang used St Patrick's Day distractions.The theft comes six months after Italy's culture ministry paid Sotheby around $15 million to acquire another Antonello da Messina work, the double-sided Ecce Homo and Saint Jerome in the Desert, pulling it from a New York auction in a private treaty sale in February. That acquisition, hailed by Giuli as a major coup for Italy's cultural heritage, had already raised the market profile of an artist whose surviving output is limited to roughly 40 known paintings worldwide.   The case has been opened on charges of aggravated theft of works of art against persons unknown. No arrests have yet been made. The Museo Regionale di Messina reopened to the public on Tuesday.   Separately, in recent days Italian police said they had recovered three paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse worth more than €9 million that were stolen from a museum near Parma in northern Italy in March.