European Pagan Memory Day

A city with a so rich history like Florence must certainly be full of recalls to the classical myth; the ones in Florence have been built since Roman times to more recent centuries.

The photo sequence you'll find here below is only representative of what this city can offer: for sure, there are more representation of classical myths not listed here.

This is true even only for the Boboli Gardens, where you'll find much more statues than the ones depicted on this page. The Garden was at the beginning the private garden of the Pitti Palace and nowadays it's a public park well-known for his collection of sculptures dated from antiquity to the twentieth century. One between the two fountains of Neptune in Florence is here. Among the deities represented in the Boboli gardens we can see also a young Jupiter and a Jupiter-Serapis, Demeter, Bacchus, Asclepius, Vulcan, Flora, the Muses. Some of these are Roman statues, brought here from the Medici's collection, other have been sculpted in sixteenth or seventeenth century.

The Budini Gattai Palace is another example of noble residence adorned with images of classical Gods: there are a fountain with Aphrodite rising from waters and a statue of Hermes.

Also in Piazza della Signoria, one of the main squares in Florence, there are two mythological figures: the fountain of Neptune, by Bartolomeo Ammannati, built in 1560-75 to celebrate the success of Florence over the sea, and the statue of Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini, some years older. On the fountain of Neptune, a part from Neptune himself, there are several mythological figures: Scylla e Charybdis, some gods and goddesses of the sea like Thetis and Nereus, together with satyrs and nymphs, these latter work by Giambologna. One of the satyr is a copy of the original, made by Francesco Pozzi in 1831, after the original had been stolen in 1830. The statue of Neptune was restored in 2006, restoring also his hand, damaged by a vandal.

Back to the map of myth in Italian cities