On the night of August 11, 2004, thieves took a painting of Saint Agnes from the Madonna della Potenza church in Sulmona, a town in Abruzzo. Agnes is usually painted with a lamb, and this one was too. Years later, Carabinieri officers walking the stalls at Mercanteinfiera, a big antiques fair in Parma, photographed a canvas of a young woman holding a half-unrolled scroll.
The clever bit
Those snapshots go into SWOADS, the AI search system of Italy’s art-crime Carabinieri. It compares pictures from fairs, auction sites, social media and the dark web against Italy’s stolen-art database of more than a million records. Instead of keyword searches like “woman with a scroll,” it matches visual fingerprints, such as shades of colour and rough outlines, so it can flag a work even after someone repaints it or cuts it into pieces.
A couple of hours after the photos went in, the system flagged a match: the Sulmona Saint Agnes. Someone had painted over the lamb to make a scroll, and the BBC reports the halo and palm branch were erased too. Art historians at the heritage superintendency in L’Aquila examined the canvas and confirmed the tampering, and the Naples prosecutor’s office had it seized. Across 2025, the system located 175 stolen cultural items and led to the recovery of 51.
The machine doesn’t get bored.
— Lt Col Salvatore Rapicavoli, Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, speaking to BBC Future, via bbc.com
Hooray
A small town got its saint back. The canvas hangs again in the Madonna della Potenza church for anyone to visit, and a possible restoration by Italy’s culture ministry could bring back the lamb.
What comes next
The system can only find what someone reported and photographed, and it still struggles with 3D objects shot from a different side. People chase every lead: Italy has about 300 people assigned to art crime, a former head of the FBI’s Art Crime Team told the BBC. The theft is too old to prosecute. The Carabinieri’s SWOADS2 upgrade aims to add 3D images and video.