A famous 16th-century statue of Neptune in Florence's central square has been repaired a year after it was badly damaged by vandals. The head of Florentine stoneworking heritage workshop Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Cristina Acidini, told reporters why it took so long to make the statue whole again.
"Neptune's hand and staff were shattered into more than 30 pieces," she said, explaining that the painstaking work of reassembly had only recently been completed. Actually mounting the reassembled pieces only took a week, Acidi said.
"The hand was set onto the arm of the statue with a stainless-steel bit using four pins to keep it steady. Then it was reinforced using epoxy resin". Florence's culture councillor Simone Siliani thanked the 23 private sponsors who came up with the 11,000 euros to give Neptune his hand back.
He said the city was now casting around for some 1.5 million euros to restore the whole fountain, which features several other figures including a horse-drawn chariot. The city's heritage superintendent, Bruno Santi, called for a project to protect the open-air statues and monuments around Florence.
"You can't seal off a whole city," he said.
The hand, and the staff it holds, snapped off last August 2 under the weight of a drunken youth who scaled the fountain with two friends. The statue of Neptune was sculpted by Bartolomeo Ammannati between 1565 and 1575. It stands in Piazza della Signoria, near a corner of the historic Palazzo Vecchio city hall.
The 4.2-metre monument, known to Florentines at the 'biancone' (White Giant), has suffered damage from vandals several times in the past. In 1981, one of the stone horses pulling Neptune's shell-shaped chariot had its front hooves broken off. A year later, during the night after Fiorentina won the Italian soccer championship, the statue's shoulder was painted bright blue.
The hooves of the horses were broken off again in 1986 and 1989.
In 1991 a man wearing only underpants climbed up the statue in a bid to remove the spiky ring of metal which authorities had placed on its head to keep pigeons and their excrement off it.
