Statue of Lazzaro Spallanzani

Piazza Spallanzani

42019 Scandiano

On that occasion, Piazza Maggiore was renamed after and dedicated to this illustrious scientist. The statue is made of Carrara marble, funded by a collection of donations from the citizens of Scandiano organized some years earlier by the public notary Pietro Prampolini. It depicts the scholar as he examines a frog through a magnifying glass. The main statue is the work of the sculptor Guglielmo Fornaciari from Reggio Emilia, while the frog was sculpted by Vasco Montecchi from Scandiano. The scientist in a standing position, dressed in eighteenth-century clergymen’s clothes, holding a magnifying glass in his right hand while he examines the circulation in the blood vessels of a frog fixed on a small “scaffold” held in his left hand.