When Catania unveiled this statue, there was not yet a single monument in the city dedicated to the house of Savoy. The first political figure to whom the Catanese decided to raise a marble in a public space was therefore a republican: Giuseppe Mazzini, dead barely three years. In 1875 that was not a neutral homage, it was a stand.
What to see
The idea matured in the first decade after unification, in a city where the reformist and liberal-democratic press was extremely active and openly hostile to the policies of the governing right. The monument was inaugurated on 18 April 1875, several years ahead of similar initiatives in other Italian cities, Genoa included, which was Mazzini's birthplace. The ceremony was a popular demonstration: the democratic and workers' associations were there, the president of the workers' chamber spoke, poems were read, and the inaugural speech was given by Antonino Abate, a leading figure of the Catanese democratic milieu, setting off a debate in the local press. Some historians have read the whole operation as a symbolic protest against the repressive policies of the central government. That the effect was immediate is shown by one detail: already the following year, in 1876, Karl Baedeker's handbook listed the villa Bellini as a public garden adorned with a statue of Mazzini erected the year before.
The work is a full-length marble statue on a simple base, set into the monumental route of the garden's old Labyrinth. The language is sober and realistic, consistent with its civic function. The author is the Catanese sculptor Francesco Licata, though it should be said that nineteenth-century sources do not agree and the attribution is not held to be entirely certain; it is confirmed by the twentieth-century local press, which recalls that Licata had started out as a tinsmith before coming to sculpture. Let us add a detail that closes a circle: a sculptor of that name, in the same years and the same city, is the one who in 1882 died of a heart attack inside the basin of the fountain of Ceres, in piazza Cavour, which he had entered for simple maintenance. In all probability it is the same person.
Visiting
It stands inside the Bellini garden, is seen free of charge during the park's hours, and needs nothing more than finding. Ten minutes, and it is worth putting into a walk through the garden, which has several nineteenth-century monuments.
Our editors' tip
Look at what is missing. Around this statue there are no allegorical figures, there is no Italy kneeling at his feet, there are no trophies nor eagles nor crowns: there is a man standing on a plain base, dressed as he dressed, without attributes. In the nineteenth century celebratory sculpture almost always did exactly the opposite, and the sobriety here is not poverty of means but consistency. On a republican who had spent his life refusing thrones and crowns you could not hang the symbols of power: you could only leave him his face.
