Il Porcellino in Florence: why do people rub the boar's nose?

What is the Porcellino?

It's a fountain: a bronze boar with water running from its mouth, in the loggia of the Mercato Nuovo, a stone's throw from the Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria. Florentines call it il Porcellino, "the piglet", which is a rather hopeful nickname for a fully grown wild boar, copied in every detail. The name caught on so well that it rubbed off on the place: the loggia is also known as the Loggia del Porcellino.

There's a detail that's easy to miss. In 1677, a guidebook to the city singled out the base of the fountain, crowded with little creatures of water and land which, it said, looked alive.

Who made the Porcellino?

Pietro Tacca, the leading pupil of Giambologna, the great sculptor in the Medici's service. When his master died in 1608, Tacca took over the workshop and succeeded him as sculptor to the Grand Dukes. He even had to finish work Giambologna had left incomplete, such as the equestrian statue of Ferdinando I.

He made the boar in the seventeenth century for Grand Duke Cosimo II, according to the Uffizi Galleries. The exact date depends on who you ask; one source has it standing in Florence from around 1633.

A boar with a long family tree: the original and its copies

This is where it gets interesting. Tacca didn't invent his boar: he copied it. The model is a marble boar that turned up in Rome in 1556, on the slopes of the Esquiline Hill, and arrived in Florence in 1568, along with two statues of Molossian hounds, as a gift from Pope Pius IV to Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. It went first to the Palazzo Pitti and ended up in the Uffizi.

From the start it was called "the Greek boar", because it's so finely made. The Uffizi, however, see it differently: it's probably the work of an artist of the second or first century BC, inspired by a Greek bronze model from the Hellenistic period, perhaps part of a hunting group. That's why the animal looks so alive: the approaching hunter has just woken it, and, frightened, it's rising on its front legs and sniffing the air.

So the line goes like this: a Greek bronze, a Roman marble inspired by it, Tacca's bronze copying the marble and, last of all, the boar in the loggia, which isn't the original either, because Tacca's bronze is kept in the Museo Bardini. And the family doesn't stop there: there are replicas all over the world.

The 1677 guidebook also passes on a bit of workshop gossip about the mould. To copy the ancient piece, one mould-maker had the nerve to suggest snapping off the statue's lower lip. He was silenced and sent packing. Tacca solved the problem with another material, out of sight. A papal gift was not something you took a chisel to.

Why is the Porcellino's snout so shiny?

For the oldest answer, you have to turn to Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish teller of fairy tales. He knew the boar well: in April 1834, on his first trip to Italy, he noted in his diary that people seemed to kiss it when they went to drink, and that its snout and one ear shone from all the touching. He was back in Florence in December 1840, and in 1842 he published a tale called The Metal Pig, as part of a travel book. According to the critical edition of his tales, the idea came from that first visit. The tale opens with a description of the fountain: a bronze pig with fresh water pouring from it, darkened by the years to a deep green. Everything except the snout, which gleams as if freshly buffed. And he gives the reason: hundreds of youngsters and poor folk cling to it to bring their lips to the spout and drink.

Not luck, not wishes. Thirst.

The tale goes on with a poor boy who's spent the whole day begging without getting a penny. One winter's night he drinks from the boar, makes a supper of a few salad leaves and a couple of chestnuts, climbs onto its back and falls asleep. At midnight the animal carries him off across the slumbering city: Piazza della Signoria, the Uffizi gallery, the church of Santa Croce. At dawn, the boy says goodbye with a kiss on its snout. A kiss of affection, mind you, not a ritual to ask for anything. Andersen closes the story with that boy grown up into a painter, and his painting of a lad asleep against the metal pig, its frame hung with black ribbon: the painter had just died.

When did people start rubbing the snout for luck?

The custom you'll see is a different one: you put a coin in the boar's mouth so that it drops through the grating, and rub the snout to make sure you return to Florence. Since when? We don't know, and that's the honest part of this story. The 1677 guidebook talks about the water, the little creatures and the mould, and says nothing about luck. Andersen puts the shine down to thirst. We know of no early mention of the superstition.

The oldest clue we've got is from the twentieth century. In 1962 a donor gave a replica of the boar to a children's hospital in Kansas City, where it's said to have raised a great deal of money. And in 1968 a Florentine marchesa gave another to the city of Sydney, in memory of her father and her brother, both surgeons at Sydney Hospital, so that the coins would go to the hospital. Its 1968 inscription already calls it a "fountain of good luck". If by the 1960s the boar was travelling with its custom in tow, the custom must have been well established by then. But that's the twentieth century, not the seventeenth.

Most likely, it's a modern habit that grew up with tourism. That doesn't make it any less charming: it's a tradition still in the making, and it grows with every hand that passes over the snout. Just don't pass it off as something handed down from the Medici.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: the Porcellino is a bronze boar by Pietro Tacca, made in the seventeenth century for Cosimo II. It copies a Roman marble boar in the Uffizi, which came to Florence in 1568 as a gift from Pius IV. Tacca's original is kept in the Museo Bardini; the one in the loggia is a replica.
• Anecdote, according to a 1677 guidebook: the one about the mould-maker who wanted to break the marble's lip.
• Fact, according to Andersen: in his 1834 diary the snout shines from all the touching; in his 1842 tale, because children and poor people hold on to it to drink.
• Undated custom: rubbing the snout and dropping a coin to return or for luck. We've found no early records; by the 1960s it was travelling with the replicas. Not finding a record doesn't prove there isn't one.
• No basis: presenting it as a tradition from the days of the Medici.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "Legends of Florence", a walk through the stories the city tells about itself and where they really come from. You hear it under the loggia of the Mercato Nuovo, at the stop "The boar with the shiny snout". Just before it, in the same loggia, "The wheel of the Mercato Nuovo" tells another local legend: the marble wheel in the floor, which the 1677 guidebook linked to the carroccio, the cart that bore the city's standard, rather than to any punishment. For the practical side of your trip, see our Florence guide.

Further reading

• Gallerie degli Uffizi, "Cinghiale" (catalogue entry, in Italian). https://www.uffizi.it/opere/cinghiale
• MUS.E (Musei Civici Fiorentini), "Intorno al Porcellino: letture-laboratori al Museo Stefano Bardini", 15 September 2017 (in Italian). https://musefirenze.it/intorno-al-porcellino-letture-laboratori-al-museo-bardini/
• Hans Christian Andersen, "The Metal Pig" ("Metalsvinet", 1842), translated by Jean Hersholt, Hans Christian Andersen Centre (University of Southern Denmark). https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheMetalPig_e.html
• Erik Dal (ed.), H.C. Andersens Eventyr, vol. VII, Copenhagen, C. A. Reitzel, 1990, pp. 225–226 (commentary on "Metalsvinet", quoting the 1834 diary; in Danish), on Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur. https://tekster.kb.dk/text/adl-texts-hcaeventyr07val-shoot-idm139890595163824.pdf
• Francesco Bocchi and Giovanni Cinelli, Le bellezze della città di Firenze, Florence, 1677 (in Italian). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/lebellezzedellac00bocc
• City of Sydney, "Il Porcellino" (entry for the Sydney replica). https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/sculptures/il-porcellino