Italy’s statues face representation battle

Prato della Valle, a beloved public square in the northern Italian city of Padua, one of the biggest piazzas in all of Europe. Built in the late 1700s with statues of people important to Padua's history, like Galileo. Now, more than 200 years later, a group of young Padua city councillors wants to insert into this pantheon of 78 men a statue of a remarkable and long-overlooked woman. That historical figure is Elena Cornaro Piscopia. She's the first woman in the world to graduate from university with a PhD in philosophy in 1678. The only statue of her in all of Italy is here at the University of Padua. Margherita Colonello is one of the city councillors to propose a statue of Cornaro Piscopia be put on a pedestal left vacant when Napoleon's troops toppled some of the statues two centuries ago. So right now in our present, women are so important. They finally have their place. This University of Padua history professor agrees Italy needs more female statues and street names. But he says putting Cornaro Piscopia on an empty pedestal here would be a distortion of history. I think it's pretty dangerous to play a game with statues and places. This is a cancel culture. So you have to explain monuments, not to destroy. Francesca Tomei is part of an association of cultural workers whose recent survey found of the thousands of public statues in Italy, only 200 are female, but it's not just the low numbers. They are representing how men used to see women. This may explain why most of these statues are beautiful and young, for example. Or used to glorify the talents of men, like the bust of 16th century poet Gaspara Stampa, the only woman in Padua's Prato delle Valle, inserted at the feet of a male Renaissance sculptor. Padua City Council will vote on whether to raise Elena Cornaro Piscopia to new public heights at the end of the month. Megan Williams, CBC News, Padua.