<story><title>Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman&apos;s hot plate</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forgotten-268-million-cimabue-painting-found-in-an-elderly-womans-home-heads-to-the-louvre-180983280/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DylanSp</author><text>My favorite example of this is the Third Imperial Faberge egg. It was made in 1887, seized by the Soviets during the Russian Revolution, and apparently sold abroad. It ended up in a flea market in the US in 2004, when a scrap dealer bought it without knowing what it was. He wasn&amp;#x27;t able to sell it for the price he wanted, so he kept it in his kitchen as decoration for several years. In 2012, he googled around and found an article about the missing egg, realized he probably had it, contacted a jeweler and Faberge expert, who flew out and found the egg sitting next to some cupcakes on the guy&amp;#x27;s kitchen counter: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&amp;#x2F;multimedia&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;02855&amp;#x2F;egg_2855547c.jpg?imwidth=350&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&amp;#x2F;multimedia&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;02855&amp;#x2F;egg_285...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;This Telegraph article has more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;art&amp;#x2F;art-news&amp;#x2F;10706025&amp;#x2F;The-20m-Faberge-egg-that-was-almost-sold-for-scrap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;art&amp;#x2F;art-news&amp;#x2F;10706025&amp;#x2F;Th...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman&apos;s hot plate</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forgotten-268-million-cimabue-painting-found-in-an-elderly-womans-home-heads-to-the-louvre-180983280/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gedy</author><text>It’s fascinating what older people have in their home sometimes. When we bought our home, the elderly lady we bought it from left a carved wooden panel on the wall. It was pretty, but we didn’t give it much notice. When I looked more closely at it a few years later, I saw it had a really old Wells Fargo shipping label on it, and after doing more digging, found that this had been displayed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The shipping label was to that event.</text></comment>