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The Mona Lisa Heist
21st August 2018
Today, 107 years ago the most famous painting in the world ‘The Mona Lisa’, by Leonardo da Vinci was stolen from the Louvre Gallery! It took a team of investigators two years to find her, all the way in Florence.
So how did the greatest art heist occur?
It wasn’t anything spectacular like the Italian Job or Oceans 11. The piece of art was stolen by an Italian criminal, Vincenzo Perugia who had moved to Paris in 1908 and worked at the Louvre Gallery. Perugia hid in the gallery overnight where he removed the Mona Lisa from its frame and waited until the gallery reopened to walk out with the painting under his white smock.
Perugia took the painting to his lodgings in Paris until November 1913 where he wrote to an art dealer in Florence offering to bring the painting to Italy for a reward of 500,000 lire. He then travelled to Florence by train, taking the Mona Lisa in a trunk before presenting the piece of art to Alfredo Geri. Geri persuaded him to leave the piece of art for expert examination and the police arrested Perugia later that day.
Perugia claimed that he had stolen the Mona Lisa out of “patriotic desire” to return the masterpiece to Italy. He served a minor prison sentence of six months before being released.
The Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre and has hung there safely ever since.
She now helps attract over 9.7 million visitors to the Paris museum every year. Noah Charney (a professor of art history and author of “The Thefts of the Mona Lisa”) states that if a different piece of Da Vinci’s work had been stolen, then that wold probably be the most famous art work in the world – not the Mona Lisa!
Can you and your team create a Da Vinci masterpiece? Check out our Da Vinci's Designs event to find out more...
Indoor
Rollercoaster
Overview
Thrills, Spills and Teambuilds...
The challenge is for teams to work together to design and build a rollercoaster which transports a football along its entire length propelled only by gravity!
The ball must roll unaided from the start to the end of your rollercoaster. Bonus points for unnecessary engineering jumps, twists or even a loop the loop into the crazy structure.
Our Rollercoaster challenge is a great team building event for groups of all sizes but with a huge group the event becomes quite a spectacle.
You will need plenty of space; it is surprising how quickly the structure grows. This event quickly combines the logical and creative strengths of participants in a massive coordinated team building challenge that is fantastic fun.
About
The Event Format
The group will be split into teams; each team is tasked with building a section of the track using bamboo canes, plastic tubing, cable ties and string.
Teams need to be organised and communicate well to ensure their individual sections line up for a seamless transition. Bonus points are awarded for 'design flourishes'; can you succeed where many have failed and complete a loop the loop?!
Once complete, your group is allowed one test run where they can make any changes before the Grand Finale. As the ball starts its journey, the excitement and noise starts to build as the ball travels 2 metres...down a spiral...4 metres...over a gap...5 metres...the tension is unbearable, the cheering unstoppable, and then...successfully loops the loop!
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About
More Details
This event provides great team building – this exercise is good fun with elements of planning, communication and creativity. This is also available as an outdoor event.
For more than 25 years we’ve run our corporate events at hundreds of venues across the UK. We can, therefore, suggest a great venue near you for our Rollercoaster Challenge, alternatively we may be able to set up in your offices.
The Rollercoaster Challenge was great! Everyone really enjoyed it and I’ve had a lot of people comment on how fun it was. I think everyone appreciated the fact that the ‘teams’ were working together rather than competing against each other, and that the challenge involved multiple skills such as creativity, planning, practical skills, and refinement.
UCB