When the gaggle of male officials, led by former Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte, unveiled a new statue in Sapri, in the southern Campania region, they were universally admiring.
Yet the artwork, a tribute to ‘La Spigolatrice di Sapri’ (‘The Gleaner of Sapri’), a poem written by Luigi Mercantini in 1857, has been criticised as sexist by others.
The bronze work depicts a sultry female figure in a transparent dress, her head turned, clutching her bosom. Politician Laura Boldrini is one of those who believes it an inappropriate tone for a public artwork.
‘The newly inaugurated statue in Sapri and dedicated to Spigolatrice, it is an offence to women and to the history it should celebrate’, Boldrini wrote on social media.
From the point of view of a female farm worker, the contemporaneous poem describes the heroics of those who fought with Carlo Pisacane, one of the first Italian socialist thinkers, in a failed attack against the Kingdom of Naples in 1857.
‘How can even [public] institutions accept the representation of women as a sexualized body?’ Boldrini continued. ‘Male chauvinism is one of the evils of Italy.’
Social media users were quick to agree, with many posting outraged messages calling for the work by sculptor Emanuele Stifano to be removed, while others humorously suggested similarly erotic designs to commemorate historic Italian figures, not least the Nobel-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi Montalcini.
