Touch, kiss, lie: Italy’s statues that ask something of you
The great museums ask you to look. These statues ask you to participate.
There’s something Italians have always understood about the sacred that other cultures are still working out: that it needs to be physical. You don't necessarily need to believe at a distance. Instead, they encourage you to press your lips to cold bronze, you slide a hand into a marble mouth, you rub a shoulder or a foot or a breast worn smooth by a thousand strangers before you, and you make your appeal to whatever is listening.
Italy isn’t short on statues. But here are the six worth finding.
Bocca della Verità, Rome
The Bocca della Verità is a first-century marble disc – probably a drain cover originally, carved with a river god’s face – set into the portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It’s been functioning as an instrument of truth for over a thousand years, on the basis that anyone who puts their hand in the mouth while lying will lose it.
Most people don’t fully believe this.
Most people hesitate anyway.
The church behind the portico is one of the finest medieval interiors in Rome and it’s almost always empty, which tells you something about where tourists choose to direct their attention. It takes ten minutes and it’s worth every one of them.
Hint: The church also houses the head of St Valentine
St Peter’s toe, Vatican City
There’s a 13th-century bronze statue of Saint Peter inside St Peter’s Basilica whose right toe has been kissed and touched by so many pilgrims over so many centuries that it’s worn to almost nothing. What remains isn’t really a toe anymore. It’s an accumulation – of faith, of repetition, of the kind of ordinary devotion that doesn’t make it into any official record but shows up in the bronze.
I’ve stood in that queue twice. Both times I watched the faces of the people ahead of me and understood something about Italian Catholicism that I couldn’t have read in a book. That’s what this statue offers, if you’re paying attention.
Juliet’s statue, Verona
The bronze Juliet at Casa di Giulietta was installed in the 1970s. She’s a statue of a fictional character, based on a poem, whose right breast has been rubbed to a high shine by millions of people seeking luck in love. The ritual is recent. The instinct behind it is ancient – the specific Italian conviction that the right object, touched at the right moment, can intervene on your behalf.
Whether you find that moving or absurd probably depends on what you’ve been asking for lately.
The wall of love notes behind her is worth seeing too – not for the romance of it, but for the sheer volume. Layer upon layer of handwriting from people who wanted something badly enough to write it on a wall in a foreign city. There’s something in that worth sitting with.
The bull at Mercato Nuovo, Florence
Everyone goes to the Mercato Nuovo for il Porcellino, the bronze boar whose snout you rub for luck while dropping a coin through the grate. It’s a good ritual. But set into the paving stones nearby is a bull medallion that most visitors walk straight over without noticing, and Florence, characteristically, doesn’t advertise it.
The city has a long habit of putting the things that matter slightly out of reach – not hidden, just not announced. If you find the bull, you find it. That’s part of the deal.
Pulcinella, Naples
Pulcinella has represented Naples since the 17th century because Naples recognised something true in him: a hunchbacked, hook-nosed trickster who survives everything through wit and a fundamental refusal to take authority seriously. He’s a truth-teller in the way that tricksters always are, which is sideways and deniably, and the city has claimed him completely.
You’ll find him in ceramic in every souvenir shop on the waterfront. The bronze versions in the historic centre are a different matter – quieter, less performed. I’d go looking for one of those instead.
