Monumento alla Donna

The bronze Monument to Women depicts two figures whose forms evoke the countryside — clods, trunks and haystacks — and stands near central Mantua. Unveiled in 1974 while Bertolucci filmed Novecento in the city, and repositioned in 2025 when Piazza Cavallotti was rebuilt, the Monument to Women honours the farming civilization that shaped the Mantovano.

Why it matters

Most public monuments in Mantua celebrate princes and generals; this one celebrates women, and specifically the peasant women whose labour defined the surrounding countryside. Its sculptor, Giuseppe Gorni, came from a village in the Mantovano itself and spent his career carving the rural world into bronze and stone. The statue's own biography is unusually cinematic — its unveiling was staged by the cast and crew of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento — and its 2025 repositioning at the head of corso Umberto I made it the symbolic door of the renewed city centre.

What to notice

• The two connected female figures, cast in a brown-green bronze, modelled with surfaces that evoke mulberry bark and worked earth rather than smooth classical flesh.
• The white marble pedestal, and the play of voids between the figures that lets you read the group differently from each side of the square.
• The theme of mutual support: this is not a mother-and-child emblem but two bodies leaning on one another, care made into a public image.
• The setting between the colonnade of the Teatro Sociale and the axis of corso Umberto I, at the entrance to the city centre.

Context and history

The project began with the gallery owner Rodolfo Stranieri, who proposed honouring the feminine ethic of Italy's peasant civilization with a public sculpture; the idea took shape around Gorni's 1972 anthological exhibition at the Casa del Mantegna, and funding came from public subscription and the sale of small multiples of the original model — the sculptor, famously, refused payment of any kind. Giuseppe Gorni, born at Nuvolato di Quistello in the Mantovano in 1894, was in his eighties when the work took shape. The bronze was unveiled on the evening of 12 October 1974, in the rain and before a huge crowd, by the actresses Stefania Sandrelli and Laura Betti, then filming Novecento around Parma and Mantua, with Bertolucci and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in the crowd.

The work has carried several titles — Monumento alla Donna, Donne, and Confidenze, the name of the small model Gorni enlarged for the square — but its subject has stayed constant: a Mater Terrae, women transfigured into the forms of the land they worked. Initially placed on the corso Libertà traffic island, it was later moved near the Teatro Sociale colonnade, and on 30 August 2025 it was relocated once more into an island bed at the centre of the redesigned Piazza Felice Cavallotti, with the mayor formally rededicating it with a new plaque.