Loggia del Mercato Nuovo
Florence Italy
2016

Most people know it as “porcellino” (piglet), but in reality, this bronze statue by Pietro Tacca, in the Loggia del Mercato Nuovo, represents a wild boar.
This is a copy, as the original statue is located in Palazzo Pitti. But, why has the copy become more popular than the original? Because the Florentines believe that, if you make a wish and then put a coin in the porcellino‘s mouth, you will see your desire come true. But this will happen only if the coin ends up in the grate under the statue.

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

Il Porcellino (Italian "piglet") is the local Florentine nickname for the bronze fountain of a boar. The fountain figure was sculpted and cast by Baroque master Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) shortly before 1634, following a marble Italian copy of a Hellenistic marble original, at the time in the Grand Ducal collections and today on display in the classical section of the Uffizi Museum. The original, which was found in Rome and removed to Florence in the mid-16th century by the Medici, was associated from the time of its rediscovery with the Calydonian Boar of Greek myth.


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


The Loggia del Mercato Nuovo, popularly known as the Loggia del Porcellino, is a building in Florence, Italy. It is so called to distinguish it from the Mercato vecchio that used to be located in the area of today's Piazza della Repubblica.

In the heart of the historic center, just a few steps away from Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria, you'll find one of the most characteristic points in all of Florence, the Loggia del Mercato Nuovo, or New Market.

This arcade with its wide Renaissance-style arches, was built halfway through the 16th century to accomodate the silk and precious objects trade and is still today a lively marketplace crammed with stalls of souvenir sellers.

The place constantly attracts flocks of tourists due to the famous fountain of the Piglet, on its southern side. Oddly enough, the fountain is not of a piglet but of a wild boar, and is a copy of the Greek marble original on display in the Uffizi Galleries.

The fountain of the piglet is one the most popular monuments in Florence, a bit like the Mouth of Truth, in Rome. Tradition has it, in fact, that whoever wants good luck should touch the nose of the statue: the nose is shiny from the daily rubbing of hundreds of hands. To complete the operation, you have to place a coin in the boar's mouth and wait until the water makes it fall: if the coin slips through the grate over the drain, all is well, otherwise—nothing doing.

An ancient tradition connects the Loggia to the origins of a well-known Italian expression: to "end up with your butt on the ground" means to be flush out of money, broke. Set into the center of the pavement, there's a disk that, in Renaissance Florence, functioned as a true scandal stone. Debtors were chained over it, forced to take off their pants and underwear and then repeatedly made to bang their bottom "on the ground".

The stone also has a precise historical significance because it's the full-sized representation of a wheel from the 'carroccio', the traditional ox-drawn cart that was the symbol of the Florentine Republic carrying the banners of the Comune onto the battlefield. Around this stone point indicated on the ground, the Florentine troops would gather before combat.