Daily Times

A voluptuous statue of a mermaid, which sits in a new square in the Puglia town called Piazza Rita Levi-Montalcini in Southern Italy, has created a stir for being “too provocative”.

Created by students at the Luigi Rosso art school in Monopoli, it is placed in a square named after the Nobel prize-winning Italian scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini.

Adolfo Marciano, the headteacher of the Luigi Rosso art school, said the statue was a “tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy”. The sculpture was created after a commission from the local municipality and is part of a €350,000 redevelopment of the area.

Marciano further told The Guardian that the students were tasked by the mayor of Monopoli to create several statues for the town, including one on the theme of the sea. “The students got together and came up with the idea of a mermaid. The council was shown the scale model and said it was good, and then decided the completed sculpture would be placed in the square,” he said.

He added that he did not want to cast judgment on the students’ inspiration and that he viewed the statue “as a representation of reality, in this case of the female body”. “You see adverts on television with models who are very thin, but the mermaid is like a tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy, especially in our country. It would have been very bad if we had represented a woman who was extremely skinny,” Marciano said.

While the artwork is yet to be officially inaugurated, it began to be criticised after photos from its installation surfaced on social media. Tiziana Schiavarelli, an actor from the nearby city of Bari, wrote on Facebook that a friend from Monopoli had been “rightly perplexed” by the monument.

“At first glance, it doesn’t look like the image of the famous scientist. It actually looks like a mermaid with two silicone boobs and above all the hugest a** ever seen on a mermaid. At least the ones I know,” Schiavarelli wrote, adding that she didn’t “mind the authors of the work, nor the municipal administration of Monopoli” it just “amuses me a lot. Who knows, maybe it will become a tourist attraction?” A user wrote on Twitter: “Is the mermaid’s last name Kardashian?” “This mermaid statue at Monopoli is giving anime artists who’s never been around any women, understands geometry or any basic physics ever eventually makes art. Like what?” another added.