The debate on the "Statue of the porchetta" appeared in recent days in the center of Piazza San Giovanni della Malva, in the heart of Trastevere. After the protests and requests for removal, the animal rights associations have taken legal action, with theAida - Italian Association for the Defense of Animals and the Environment - who presented a complaint to the Court of Auditors against the "stone porchetta". "We have sent a report to the Court of Auditors of the Lazio Region to ask to verify if this story of the statue has cost public money and if any such expenditure it is to be considered indispensable at a similar time and with the debt situation in which it is paid the city of Rome", We read in a note from the Aidaa, which attacks:"We wonder if in a city where holes are not covered, where buses catch fire and where waste invades the streets, public money was hoped to advertise the sad and macabre statue of the dead pig., of which we ask for the immediate removal ".
The animal welfare associations had sided compactly, from the first moment, against the "stone pig", prompting the president of Municipality I, Sabrina Alfonsi, to intervene: "We are talking about the work of a young Roman, a student at a school of high education, who wanted to propose his reflection in artistic form on a food that is part of the popular gastronomic tradition and which recalls conviviality and being together - he explained - Only one of the eight proposals by young artists - evaluated by a commission of experts - which are part of the Piazze Romane project promoted by the Municipality together with Ruafa, with the idea of bringing the contemporary art in the squares already redeveloped with the projects of the Call for Rome Sei Mia and offer young people an important stage and a moment of visibility ”.
Alfonsi then stressed that "our role as public administrators was simply to create an opportunity, without judging in any way the underlying artistic creativity path to each of the proposed works and without making prior aesthetic judgments ". An explanation that was not enough for the animal welfare associations, which reported having received numerous phone calls from citizens offended by the work and reiterated the request: immediate removal. And an online petition launched by Daniel Diaco, a pentastellato councilor and president of the Environment Commission, who defined the work as "a statue of a corpse in the middle of Trastevere", installed "by the will of the Municipality I": the petition has reached almost 3.500 signatures out of the 2.000 initially set.
"In the intentions of Sabrina Alfonsi and Giuseppa Urso, respectively president and councilor for urban regeneration of the Municipality of Rome 1, the statue should celebrate a lost Roman tradition, the aggregative and itinerant act of consuming food outdoors - said the Low - but the work offends the sensitivity of about three hundred thousand vegan and vegetarian Romans who see in it an insult to the value of the life of animal sentient beings, to their forced sacrifice in the name of a food preference not even necessary but only selfish. The Lav also criticizes the decision to grant patronage to the initiative by the Municipality of Rome and the Ministries of Cultural Heritage and Tourism "(Rome Today).