Vacca's Lion
Medici Lions
Loggia dei Lanzi
Florence Italy
2016

Everyone knows the famous ‘Florentine Lily’, but did you know that the lion is also a symbol of the city of Florence?
Undoubtedly the most famous is the lion, called ‘Marzocco’, by Donatello whose copy in Piazza della Signoria proudly protects the red lily, coat of arms of Florence.
The image of the lion was chosen by the Florentine Republic, to replace the imperial symbol eagle, to demonstrate its political supremacy.
The ‘symbol was born’ around 1280 when the Florentines wanted to place in Piazza San Giovanni a cage with a real lion to emphasize the independence of Florence.
As luck would have it, one day the beast escaped from its cage, spreading panic through the streets of the city.
He took a child in his flight but, to the utmost amazement, handed it back without a scratch to his mother and then led back, without resistance, into a cage.
From that moment in Florence the lion was guarded as a good fortune.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medici_lions

The Medici lions are a pair of marble sculptures of lions: one of which is Roman, dating to the 2nd century AD, and the other a 16th-century pendant. Both were by 1598 placed at the Villa Medici, Rome. Since 1789 they have been displayed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The sculptures depict standing male lions with a sphere or ball under one paw, looking to the side.

Copies of the Medici lions have been made and publicly installed in over 30 other locations, and smaller versions made in a variety of media; Medici lion has become the term for the type.

A similar Roman lion sculpture, of the 1st century AD, is known as the Albani lion, and is now in the Louvre. Here, the stone used for the ball is different from the basalt body. Both may derive from a Hellenistic original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loggia_dei_Lanzi

The Loggia dei Lanzi, also called the Loggia della Signoria, is a building on a corner of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy, adjoining the Uffizi Gallery. It consists of wide arches open to the street. The arches rest on clustered pilasters with Corinthian capitals. The wide arches appealed so much to the Florentines that Michelangelo proposed that they should be continued all around the Piazza della Signoria.