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Cyprus appeals to residents to cut water use amid once-in-a-century drought

Authorities in Cyprus have urged residents to reduce their water intake by 10% – the equivalent of two minutes’ use of running water each day – as Europe’s most south-easterly nation grapples with a once-in-a century drought. The appeal, announced alongside a €31m (£27m) package of emergency measures, comes as reservoirs hit record lows with little prospect of replenishment before the tourist season starts. “Everyone has to reduce their consumption,” said Eliana Tofa Christidou, who heads the country’s water development department. “Whether that is in the shower, brushing their teeth or using a washing machine. Times are critical and every drop now counts.” It was, she told the Guardian, the Mediterranean island’s worst drought in living memory with dam inflows at their lowest since 1901, when hydrological records first begun. Vast tracts of land across the country have been baked dry, with prime forest areas desiccated and dying fast. As other parts of Europe have this winter been lashed by rain, the sight of the church of St Nicholas in the Kouris reservoir, where water levels are reported to have dropped to just 12.2% of capacity, offered further proof of the worsening crisis. If the reservoir was full, the monument would be submerged. Its appearance in what is by far the largest of a 110-strong reservoir network has demonstrated the scale of the emergency. Water reserves in February stand at 13.7% of total storage capacity compared with 26% this time last year, a figure officials were then calling dire. And the situation could get a lot worse in the EU member state with the highest water stress levels. Temperatures in the region are rising 20% faster than the global average in the climate crisis, according to the Mediterranean Growth Initiative, a data analysis platform. “This accelerated warming is putting severe pressure on freshwater resources, which are rapidly running dry,” it says. Soaring demand has intensified the island’s plight: annual rainfall has dropped an estimated 15% since 1901 while water needs have jumped 300% due to population growth and tourism. Three million tourists – nearly three times the resident population of Cyprus – visit the war-split country’s internationally recognised south each year. Tofa said a public awareness campaign would be rolled out this month with the aim of saving water. “The mean per capita consumption of water in Europe is 120 litres per person per day, but in some areas of Cyprus, being that much hotter, we have mean per capita consumption of 500 litres per day,” she said. “We’re preparing guidelines, a campaign, that will show people how much water should be used in household activities, like taking a shower, so that consumption can be kept to around 140 litres per person per day.” The drive will supplement other measures such as wastewater reuse and fixing water leakages, prevalent in up to 40% of local networks. Households will also receive financial support to invest in water-saving tap appliances. The latest emergency package is the sixth to be announced. Cyprus has made water scarcity a priority of its EU presidency and allocated €200m to improving infrastructure, with the government scrambling to install desalination plants to meet drinking water needs. Two portable desalination units were donated last year by the United Arab Emirates. “The plan is to have 14 units in operation, most by the end of 2026,” said Tofa. “Working 24/7 we installed two in a matter of months last year.” But criticism is also mounting. “The right measures were not taken at the right time,” said Charalampos Theopemptou, an MP for the Movement of Ecologists – Citizens’ Cooperation party and the chair of the environment committee in the Cypriot parliament. “Twenty years ago when scientists were predicting temperatures in Nicosia being on a par with Cairo by 2030 and Bahrain by 2045, we all knew what was coming.” Desalination plants were not only costly but risky, he said. “They need a lot of energy and pose a danger to marine life if saline waters returned to the sea are not properly dispersed. We should have been finding ways, much earlier, to reduce water demand. It’s a disgrace, for example, that public spaces are still covered by grass and that we have so many swimming pools and golf courses.” Emblematic of the explosive situation are farmers who, hardest hit by the measures, have been ordered to reduce irrigation by 30%. “Farmers are besides themselves,” said Lambros Achilleos, a prominent unionist. “There’s a lot of angst, a lot of depression, with many being told to turn to new, less water-intensive crops. How do you tell farmers in their 50s and 60s who have families to feed to do that? There’s going to be a big problem in society and all because successive governments failed to take action that could have avoided all this and protected the environment long ago.” Fadi Comair, a professor of applied hydrology and water resource management at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia said it was essential measures were taken now when a worst-case climate scenario could not be ruled out in the decades ahead. “Our research and modelling shows that, in the worst case, the increase in temperature will be 4.5 degrees by 2100, not 1.5 or 2 degrees … We’ll have a collapse of agriculture, drought will lead to the mass transfer of populations and we won’t be able to secure food,” he said.

Train derails in Switzerland amid fatal avalanches across the Alps

Avalanches from heavy snowfall in the European Alps claimed more lives over the weekend, as a train was derailed by a snow slide in Switzerland on Monday and roads and villages around Mont Blanc were closed or placed under evacuation orders. As large areas of the western Alps remained under a high risk of avalanche – following a week in which alerts reached category 5, the highest level – Swiss police said a train derailment caused by an avalanche injured five people near the town of Goppenstein. The incident in Switzerland followed a series of deadly avalanches in the Alps in recent days involving skiers. On Friday, two Britons were among three skiers killed in an avalanche while being accompanied by an instructor in Val d’Isère, in south-east France. A French national, who was skiing alone, was also killed. The Albertville prosecutor, Benoît Bachelet, said the ski instructor, who avoided injury, tested negative after taking blood and drug tests. He added that another Briton had sustained minor injuries. In another incident on Sunday, an avalanche claimed the lives of two skiers on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. The incident occurred at about 11am in the Couloir Vesses, a popular off-piste route in Courmayeur, located in the upper Val Veny, near the border with France and Switzerland. The incidents come on top of the record 13 off-piste skiers, climbers and hikers who died in the Italian mountains during the week ending 8 February, Alpine Rescue said last Monday, including 10 in avalanches triggered by an exceptionally unstable snowpack. Fresh snowfall during recent storms and windswept snowcaps on weak internal layers have created especially risky conditions along the entire Alpine crescent bordering France, Switzerland and Austria, Alpine Rescue said. “Under such conditions, the passage of a single skier, or natural overloading from the weight of snow, can be sufficient to trigger an avalanche,’’ said Federico Catania, a spokesperson for Italy’s Alpine Rescue Corps. Under the European avalanche warning system, grade 5 risk conditions are categorised as “extraordinary” and rare, being issued for conditions where the possibility of “numerous very large and extremely large natural avalanches (ie not victim triggered) can be expected” and posing danger to valley roads and settlements. In grade 5 conditions. skiers and mountaineers are cautioned to avoid all but open and unthreatened slopes. The very high current risk levels in the mountains have been produced by a combination of factors including recent heavy falls of snow, combined with high winds that have deposited heavy and unconsolidated accumulations on an already unstable snowpack produced by lean snow conditions earlier in the season. “We have had some very complicated, very unstable snow since the beginning of the season,” Luc Nicolino, slopes manager at the resort of La Plagne, told Agence France-Presse last week. “It’s a kind of mille-feuille with many hidden, fragile layers.” Conditions were already dangerous in the wake of Storm Nils, which passed through the Alps last week depositing between 60cm and 100cm of snow with a further 40-50cm predicted in some areas of the Alps during Monday. Among those caught up in the avalanches in the French Alps on Friday was Daniel Matthews, whose profile describes him as an adventure skier, who was buried for eight minutes after a couloir he was skiing collapsed and buried him before being dug out by his companions. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here but I have been getting asked so many questions about the avalanche on Friday and to be honest I don’t know how to answer them and maybe could help people not to make the mistake I made,” Matthews wrote on Instagram. “I made a very bad decision and uneducated decision to ski Skimans [sic] Couloir just off the Palafour lift in Tignes. “I dropped in and did one turn the whole couloir collapsed underneath me and I immediately tried to pull my [avalanche] airbag but as I was fell I fell forward making it impossible to reach my toggle, I was then quickly thrown into what felt like a washing machine and I just remember falling for about 35 seconds (about 400m) and then coming to a very quick stop. “I hope I and other[s] may be able to learn some things. I didn’t follow the signs that day that were clearly there! and I paid for it. The only person to blame is myself,” he added.

Disappearances in Mexico surge by 200% over 10 years

It was a bright morning in August 2022 when Ángel Montenegro was taken. A 31-year-old construction worker, Montenegro had been out all night drinking with some work buddies in the city of Cuautla and was waiting for a bus back to nearby Cuernavaca where lived. At about 10am, a white van pulled up: several men jumped out and dragged Montenegro and a co-worker inside before speeding off. Montenegro’s co-worker was released a few hundred meters down the street, but Montenegro was driven away. As soon as she heard that her son had been taken, Montenegro’s mother, Patricia García, raced to Cuautla along with his wife, brother and some neighbors. Arriving at the bus stop, all they found were Montenegro’s cap and one of his tennis shoes. The group spent all day looking for any other trace of Montenegro, but came up empty-handed. “The desperation started when night fell,” said García, who has now spent more than three torturous years looking for her son. Montenegro is one of more than 130,000 people who are considered missing or disappeared in Mexico, an ongoing crisis that has devastated tens of thousands of families across the country. While disappearances began to surge in the early 2000s as the Mexican government sought to take on the country’s cartels, a new report by the public policy analysis firm México Evalúa found that, in the last 10 years, disappearances have increased more than 200%. “It’s a problem that has become uncontrollable at the national level,” said Armando Vargas, a security analyst at México Evalúa. Disappearances “capture the lethal violence” that Mexico is experiencing. According to Vargas, the surge in disappearances over the last decade reflects the increasing takeover by criminal groups of vast swathes of the country, as well as the diversification of the activities these gangs are engaged in beyond just drug smuggling. Expanding their ranks often involves forced recruitment, while taking over new territory requires the “annihilation of rival groups”, said Vargas. But simply murdering other gang members is likely to catch the authorities’ attention: instead, cartels bury corpses in unmarked graves, burn them to ash or even dissolve them in vats of acid. By making bodies disappear, criminal groups “invisibilize the violence, because that puts them under the radar”, Vargas said. Meanwhile, criminal groups are increasingly engaging in activities that can involve abducting people and making them vanish, including organ trafficking, sex- and human-trafficking as well as migrant smuggling. The Mexican government, however, has been unable to keep up with cartels as they expand territorially and into new markets, leaving large areas of the country under near-total control of these gangs. “Criminal power advances in parallel with institutional neglect,” said Vargas. In 2018, the government launched a National Search Commission to track and find the disappeared, encouraging more people to report their missing loved ones and creating an interactive public platform that recorded disappearances across the country. But the commission was poorly funded, and the platform soon became a political thorn in the government’s side: ahead of elections in 2024, the then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, launched an opaque “review” of the register, and reduced the number of disappeared to just 12,377, sparking an outcry among activists and human rights experts. When asked about the report from México Evalúa, President Claudia Sheinbaum was dismissive, saying “that platform has a lot of problems” and promising the government would be releasing a new report to more accurately account for the disappeared. But analysts say that, if anything, the number of registered disappearances is an undercount, given the extreme rates of violence across the country and the government’s weakness in finding and identifying bodies. When investigations do take place, they are often slow and ineffective, marred by corruption and incompetence: in 2022 more than 96% of crimes in Mexico went unsolved, according to the United Nations. The lack of a substantial government response to the crisis has forced many mothers, including García, to search on their own. García joined a collective of 12 women who went out searching weekly, probing the ground with metal rods for signs of buried corpses. The November after Montenegro was taken, García and the group searched in a field on the outskirts of Cuautla where his phone had last pinged a cell tower. They found six bodies buried there, but none were her son. Four months later they went back and found another five bodies. None were her son. Despite the gruesome work, García is still searching, refusing to give up hope. But the search has taken a terrible toll, with García forced to divide her time between caring for her family and looking for her son. “You’re left in broken pieces,” said García. “It’s like when a vase shatters: you can glue it back together but the cracks are always there.”

Ukraine and Russia to meet for second round of talks as fourth anniversary of war looms

Senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are to meet this week in Switzerland for a second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The two-day meeting, kicking off on Tuesday, is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance. Despite renewed US efforts to revive diplomacy, hopes for any sudden breakthrough remain low, with Russia continuing to press maximalist demands on Ukraine. While the Abu Dhabi discussions were largely focused on military ceasefire proposals, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday the Geneva talks would address a “broader range of issues”, including territorial questions and other demands put forward by Moscow. Vladimir Medinsky, an arch-conservative Putin adviser who has previously questioned Ukrainian sovereignty, will head Russia’s negotiating team. He will be joined by Igor Kostyukov, the chief of Russian military intelligence, and the deputy foreign minister Mikhail Galuzin, among nearly two dozen officials, Moscow has said. Ukraine is expected to send the same delegation as in earlier rounds, to be led in Geneva by Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council. The choice of Switzerland marks the first time the talks will be held on European soil after earlier rounds in Abu Dhabi and Istanbul. The choice of Geneva appears to have been pushed by Washington. The Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are expected to lead US engagement with Russia and Ukraine, are scheduled to hold separate meetings with Iranian officials in the city later this week. Trump, who throughout his second presidency has veered between criticising Moscow and Kyiv, reverted this weekend to placing blame on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, suggesting Ukraine was holding up efforts to end the war. “Zelenskyy needs to act. Russia wants to make a deal. He needs to act, otherwise he will miss a great opportunity,” he said in comments to reporters. But his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, speaking at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend, said Washington remained uncertain whether Russia was genuinely serious about ending the war in Ukraine. Ahead of the Geneva meeting, Zelenskyy made clear Ukraine was unwilling to give up territory in the Donbas – a key Kremlin demand. He cited previous Russian land grabs in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea and said that “allowing the aggressor to take something is a big mistake”. “That is why now I do not want to be a president who will repeat the mistakes of his predecessors or other people … Because Putin cannot be stopped with kisses or flowers. I have never done this, and therefore I do not think that this is right. My advice to everyone: do not do this with Putin.” He said Russia was currently losing 30,000-35,000 people a month, with its attempt to seize more territory over four years of full-scale war staggeringly costly and mostly unsuccessful. “Can you imagine that in the 21st century? I’m not sure he [Putin] knows that,” Zelenskyy said. There were no expectations in Kyiv that the latest round of trilateral talks would led to a political breakthrough. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Zelenskyy said his country would not give up the heavily defended north of Donetsk oblast, including the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, or abandon the 200,000 civilians who live there. He said Ukraine would play a “constructive” role in the trilateral talks but acknowledged there were differences with the US over security guarantees. The Trump administration is offering 15 years, with Ukraine wanting an American commitment lasting 30-50 years. Kyiv hopes the war will end this year, Zelenskyy has indicated. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the presidential office, posted a photo of his departure by train for the talks with a Ukrainian delegation. He wrote: “On the way to Geneva. The next round of negotiations is ahead. Along the way, we will discuss the lessons of our history with our colleagues and seek the right conclusions. Ukraine’s interests must be protected.” The history reference appeared to be a jibe directed at Medinsky. The former culture minister is believed to have written the 2021 essay attributed to Putin, which argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single people and state, with a common origin in the ninth century. His presence is being interpreted by Kyiv as a sign the Kremlin is not taking the talks seriously. Olexiy Haran, a professor of comparative politics at the Kyiv-Mohyla academy, said Ukrainians were overwhelmingly opposed to growing US-Russian demands that Ukraine hold presidential elections. “The country is not ready for them because there are no security conditions. It would be crazy to conduct them under martial law,” he said. Haran recognised Trump and Putin were putting “huge pressure” on Zelenskyy to hold a poll over the next few months. He said the Kremlin was trying to “destabilise” the situation inside Ukraine and would not agree to a ceasefire. There were numerous legal and practical obstacles to holding a vote, he added, not least the question of how international observers could take part. He said: “Doubts of the government’s legitimacy is a trick of the Kremlin, echoed unfortunately by President Trump. Political renewal is needed, but elections can only take place once the war ends and security conditions allow.”

Germany calls on France to increase defence spending

France needs to boost its defence spending to make European self-sufficiency a reality, Germany’s foreign minister has said. As European powers increasingly acknowledge they may be left on their own for their defence as the transatlantic relationship comes under strain, Johann Wadephul said Paris needed to put its money where its mouth was. “He repeatedly and correctly refers to our pursuit of European sovereignty,” Wadephul said of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in an interview with the German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “Anyone who talks about it needs to act accordingly in their own country.” European countries are facing pressure to enhance their defence capabilities as anxiety increases about whether Washington would use its military might to come to the aid of its Nato partners in the event of an attack. Nato member states pledged at a summit last June to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, but Wadephul said progress towards that goal had been falling short. “Unfortunately, efforts in the French republic have also been insufficient to achieve this so far,” he said. “France, too, needs to do what we are doing here amid tough discussions.” Germany last year exempted most defence expenditures from its constitutional “debt brake” and it has earmarked more than €500bn for defence between 2025 and 2029. France, which is the midst of bitter battles over its public spending, places third in the EU in terms of its debt burden as a proportion of GDP, after Greece and Italy. Wadephul’s criticism comes amid friction in the Franco-German alliance, traditionally seen as the driving force in EU cooperation. Germany has rejected repeatedly Macron’s calls for pooled debt to boost investment, while there is discord between Paris and Berlin over plans to build a next-generation European fighter jet and seal an EU trade deal with a group of South American countries. On the opening day of the Munich Security Conference last week, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned of the threat Russia posed to Europe and attempted to draw the US back into firm mutual security commitments, even as he acknowledged ties were in need of repair. “In the era of great power rivalry, even the United States will not be powerful enough to go it alone,” he said. “Dear friends, being a part of Nato is not only Europe’s competitive advantage. It is also the United States’ competitive advantage. So let’s repair and revive transatlantic trust together.” At the same time, Merz disclosed he had held initial talks with Macron over the possibility of joining France’s nuclear umbrella. However, the prospect of Europe pro-actively seeking its own nuclear defence capabilities beyond US protection laid bare differences within Germany’s ruling coalition. Wadephul, a member of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voiced caution about the prospect of Europe mounting its own more robust nuclear defence, saying: “There are enough atomic weapons in the world.” He told German public television late on Sunday that “no one in Washington is questioning” whether the US would use its own nuclear arsenal to defend Europe if necessary, and he warned against creating that impression with a debate questioning the US protective shield. Germany’s vice-chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, said Berlin would continue to rely on Nato’s nuclear deterrence system and had no plans to acquire its own atomic weapons – an option it renounced under existing treaties. He welcomed the talks with France about joining its nuclear umbrella. “We’ll see what the outcome is,” Klingbeil, a Social Democrat, told the German news agency dpa. However, the senior Christian Democrat Armin Laschet said the proposal risked sending a message to Washington that Germany was voluntarily renouncing the US protective shield. And he noted that France would insist on full control over how its nuclear arsenal was used. “He [Macron] will not give the German chancellor a say in this nuclear armament issue,” Laschet said on public television. Thomas Röwekamp, the CDU chair of the Bundestag defence committee, said Germany must take on more responsibility for European security but not in an ill-advised drive to replace US nuclear guarantees. He called in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper for a “European complement within Nato” to the US atomic arsenal. France had been making a key contribution to European deterrence for years, Röwekamp said, and the current exchange showed “how closely we are continuing to develop this contribution together”. In an article published in the Guardian and the German newspaper Die Welt at the weekend, Britain and Germany’s highest-ranking military leaders made an unprecedented joint appeal to the public to accept the “moral” case for rearmament and prepare for the threat of war with Russia.

Italy’s famous Lovers’ Arch collapses into the sea on Valentine’s Day

The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy. The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas. “It is a devastating blow to the heart,” said Melendugno’s mayor, Maurizio Cisternino. “One of the most famous tourist features of our coastline and of the whole of Italy has disappeared.” According to local authorities, strong winds, rough seas and intense rainfall in recent days progressively weakened the rock structure until its final collapse on Saturday. It is the most significant damage inflicted by coastal erosion on the landscape of the Salento. “Nature has been overturned: what existed 30 years ago no longer exists. We must find the resources for an organic intervention,” Cisternino added. “It’s like a funeral,” said Melendugno’s tourism councillor, Francesco Stella. Mediterranean cyclones, known as medicanes, include Cyclone Harry which struck in January, have been devastating ports, homes and roads, reshaping the structure of coastlines. Medicanes are warm-core systems that are becoming increasingly frequent in the Mediterranean, driven by rising sea temperatures linked to the climate emergency. “With the Mediterranean [experiencing] among its hottest years on record in 2025, warmer seas are supercharging the atmosphere and fuelling extreme events,” said Christian Mulder, a professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania in Sicily. The destructive force of these cyclones, with winds exceeding 60mph (97km/h) and seas whipped into waves of up to 15 metres, has left a long trail of devastation, destroying ports, damaging homes as well as tearing up roads and eating away long stretches of coastline in southern Italy. On 25 January, after torrential rain brought by Cyclone Harry, a devastating landslide tore away an entire slope in the town of Niscemi, Sicily, creating a 4km-long chasm. Roads collapsed, cars were swallowed and whole sections of the urban fabric plunged into the valley below.

‘Bring it back’: Sicilians say Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo belongs with them

On 28 December 1908, the city of Messina was struck by what is still considered the deadliest natural catastrophe in modern European history. In just 37 seconds, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake killed half its population and levelled much of the city. Along with homes, churches and monuments, invaluable historical sources and documents were lost, including works by Messina’s greatest son, Antonello da Messina, the artist widely credited with transforming the course of Renaissance art. In the space of half a minute, a city’s memory and that of one of the greatest painters in history was buried alongside its people. Last Monday, the Italian government quietly secured a rare Renaissance masterpiece at auction in New York, spending $14.9m on an Ecce Homo by Antonello. The painting, sold at Sotheby’s, is an intensely human portrait of the suffering Christ, believed to have been completed about 1460. Museums across Italy are now holding their breath as the culture ministry deliberates over where the work will be displayed. Among the frontrunners are Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia – heavyweights of the Italian museum circuit. Yet the decision could ultimately fall in favour of the Museo di Capodimonte, whose southern setting would underscore the Neapolitan dimension of the painter’s legacy. Strikingly absent from the shortlist is Messina – the Sicilian port city where Antonello was born and where many art historians argue the painting’s return would carry the greatest symbolic force. Since the acquisition, a political tussle has flared over whether the Ecce Homo should be shown in Messina. For local officials, bringing the canvas home would be an act of historical redress – a partial restoration of what catastrophe once swept away. “Antonello is a son of Messina; he belongs to this land,” said Valentina Certo, an art historian and author of an illustrated children’s book entitled The Workshop of Antonello da Messina. “Here is the district where he worked with his son, Jacobello, and his grandsons Antonello and Pietro de Saliba. Bringing this Ecce Homo back here would be important for the city, because it would help stitch back together a fragment of the memory and historical identity of Messina – a city first devastated by an earthquake in 1783 and then by the seismic catastrophe of 1908, when a large part of our heritage was lost.” Before the devastating earthquake of 1908, Messina ranked among the most important and dynamic cities in southern Italy. Curved around its natural, sickle-shaped harbour – the ancient Zancle – the city bore the imprint of centuries of trade and cultural exchange. Elegant palazzos lined its streets, historic churches anchored its neighbourhoods. Its theatres, convents and civic buildings testified to a city that was not merely mercantile, but intellectually alive. Writers, scholars and artists passed through its port. Among them was Caravaggio, who stayed between 1608 and 1609 while fleeing Rome after being accused of murder. The earthquake levelled much of the historic centre and claimed approximately 80,000 lives – about 57% of the population – while in nearby Reggio Calabria a further third of the city, about 40,000 people, perished. What survived was not only physically diminished, but stripped of much of the cultural memory that had once made Messina a Mediterranean crossroads. “After the earthquake, many of Antonello’s works were allegedly lost or stolen,” said Lelio Bonaccorso, a graphic novelist, illustrator and Messina-based art expert. “When we speak of Antonello da Messina, we are speaking of one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance. Many credit him with introducing oil painting to Italy – a technique already established in Flemish art. It was this innovation that allowed Renaissance painters to achieve new softness in their figures, those delicate glazes and subtle shadings across the face.” Certo added: “He was a painter of extraordinary stature. On panels measuring only a few centimetres, he could render his subjects with astonishing detail.” The Ecce Homo acquired by Italy in New York is a “tiny” panel painting in tempera and oil, measuring just 19.5cm by 14cm. Painted on both sides, it depicts Christ crowned with thorns on one face and Saint Jerome set against a rocky landscape on the other. After the purchase, Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, described the painting as “unique in the landscape of 15th-century Italian art” and a cornerstone in efforts to expand and enhance the national cultural heritage. Giuli did not say where the work would be displayed, but ministry sources and media reports suggest the Ecce Homo is destined for the Museo di Capodimonte – a prospect that has angered Sicilian art critics, who argue it should return to the island. Fewer than 40 paintings by Antonello are known to have survived. After the acquisition, the regional Democratic party lawmaker Fabio Venezia formally questioned the Sicilian government, urging it to press for the painting’s return. Contacted by the Guardian, Sicily’s regional culture assessor, Francesco Scarpinato, confirmed he had opened discussions with the culture ministry, which holds final authority. On the island, frustration continues to simmer over decisions taken in Rome, long accused of neglecting Sicily’s vast cultural wealth. Venezia said: “Bringing the work back here would restore it to the historical and geographical context that produced it. To recover these works is to begin healing the wound of Sicily’s scattered artistic heritage.” For cultural advocates, more than art is at stake. Bringing an Antonello back to Sicily would be a quiet act of redress – a way of reclaiming, at least in part, what disaster and decades of misrule once stripped away.