Still Life with Cherries by Paul Cezanne is one of the paintings stolen in the raid. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Three paintings by French masters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, reportedly worth an estimated $10 million in total, have been stolen from a museum in northern Italy, police said on Monday.
The theft took place at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca, on the outskirts of the city of Parma, during the night of March 22-23, the Carabinieri police said in a statement.
Four masked men entered the villa of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, near Parma in northern Italy, and made off with the artworks overnight last Sunday into Monday, a police spokesman said, confirming a report on the Rai television network.
They made off with "Fish" by Auguste Renoir, "Still Life with Cherries" by Paul Cezanne, and "Odalisque on the Terrace" by Henri Matisse worth several million euros, said Italian media reports.
Italian public broadcaster Rai reported the stolen works were worth 9 million euros ($10.34 million), a figure that was not confirmed by the Carabinieri.
The theft at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca took less than three minutes. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Three minutes
The museum, home to a private collection compiled by the late music critic and musicologist Luigi Magnani, said separately that the theft took less than three minutes.
The thieves forced the entrance door to get into a room on the first floor before escaping across the museum gardens.
They had not been able to go any further thanks to the surveillance system and rapid intervention of police and security officers, the museum added.
The Fondazione Magnani Rocca's collection also includes works by Titian, Francisco Goya, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Claude Monet, Peter Paul Rubens and Giorgio Morandi, according to its website.
Police are looking at the museum's video-surveillance footage and that of neighboring businesses, said a police spokesman.
The Magnani Rocca Foundation 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Parma hosts the collection of art historian Luigi Magnani, which also includes works by Durer, Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya and Monet. Founded in 1977.
The theft is the latest in a series of robberies targeting major museums in Europe.
Last October, thieves broke into the world-famous Louvre museum in Paris in broad daylight, escaping in less than eight minutes with jewellery worth $102 million.