London, Sept 8 (ANI): Over 150,000 signatures have been collected by Italian campaigners, who have called on the Louvre museum in Paris to hand over Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to its "home city" of Florence.
According to the National Committee for Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage, which organised the petition, the world's most famous painting should be returned to the Uffizi museum where it was displayed early in the 20th Century, the Daily Mail reported.
Committee President Silvano Vincenti said that he has made a formal request to the French minister of culture, Aurelie Filippetti, for the painting to be returned.
He said that the return of the painting would be of "high historical value, both symbolic and moral."
But the Louvre museum itself has already snubbed the committee. And Florence's claims on the Renaissance masterpiece, known by Italians as La Gioconda, might not be that straightforward, the paper said.
The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Tuscan silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506.
But art historians think he took it with him when he moved to France in 1516.
The French Royal family then acquired it and following a spell at Versailles it ended up at the Louvre museum after the French Revolution.
It was stolen from the Paris museum in 1911and was discovered two years later at the Florence home of the Italian patriot and former Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia.
However, the painting was exhibited only briefly in the Uffizi and then in Rome before it was returned to the Louvre that year. (ANI)
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