Statue Of The Week (7)

Creating waves in the southern Italian town of Monopoli is a statue recently created by students from the Luigi Ross art school and located near to a children’s playground, part of a €350,000 redevelopment of the Piazza Rita Levi-Montalcini. It is a mermaid, but no ordinary one.

Unlike Copenhagen’s famous mermaid which is demure and so unobtrusive it can be easily missed, the Monopolian version is big, brash, and bold, boasting two enormous silicone breasts and the largest posterior ever seen on a mermaid. What it would have done to the creature’s ability to swim gracefully under water is not clear, but in this age when diversity in all its shapes and forms is to be celebrated, it is bang on trend.

The statue, which has yet to be unveiled formally, has divided opinion, but might just put the Puglian town on the tourist trail!