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THE MONUMENT IN THE PIAZZA AT GREVE
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One of the most beautiful piazza (square) in
Tuscany, a real "living room" with its arcades and terraces decorated
with flowers, always full of people and colour. The particularity of
Piazza Matteotti is to be found in its elongated triangle shape, with
the town hall at its base and the church of the Holy Cross at the
point. The piazza dates back to the 13th Century when the area was used
as a market, and which, in the following centuries, saw great
development, especially after the Unity of Italy, when the bronze
statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano was inaugurated. The statue is the
work of Romeo Pazzini, an artist from Forlì who thus honoured
the navigator and captain of fortune. On the base of the statue there
are two bronze plaques to be noted, one which depicts a caravel and the
other the Verrazzano coat of arms (the rose of the winds embellished
with the French Fleur de Lys.)
The monument is a good interpretation, using
the language of the time, of the courage and daring which pushed this
illustrious person from Greve to set off to seek a New World, inspired
by a humanistic spirit and not for practical purposes or economic gain.
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Romeo
Pazzini is the author of many sculptures in plaster, terracotta, and
bronze which are exhibited in many Italian art galleries. The most
important public monuments signed by him are the one in Verucchio,
dedicated to the soldiers who died in World War I and of course the one
in Greve celebrating Giovanni da Verrazzano. This statue was
accomplished with a contribution from the towns of Florence, Genoa,
Siena, Rimini and from King Vittorio Emanuele III and the Ministry for
the Navy, which donated the bronze from the naval shipyards at La
Spezia.
In his book about the Verrazzano family, Carlo Baldini recounts how the
actual statue differs slightly from the original model in the fact that
the beard is longer; the supervising committee decided that the beard
presented in the rough sketch was too short and so not austere enough
for such an important person as Giovanni da Verrazzano.
(Note on Pazzini by Comune di Greve in Chianti)
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