Italy’s latest cultural offering comes in the form of a bull. A mosaic bull, to be precise, now adorning the Piazza Cordusio in Milan. The restoration of this ancient Roman floor, unearthed during renovations of a bank building, was supposed to be a triumph of archaeology and civic pride.
Instead, it has become a spectacle of international bemusement. The bull, you see, is charmingly well-endowed. Its anatomy has been rendered with a frankness that would make a Victorian blush, and the internet, predictably, has lost its collective mind.
Memes abound. Jokes about spaghetti and virility circulate. And we are meant to laugh along, to shrug at the quaintness of a two-thousand-year-old phallus peeking through a pavement.
But I find myself unable to join the merriment. For this bull is not a joke. It is a mirror.
It reflects a civilisation so obsessed with surface and sensation that it can no longer recognise its own symbols. The Roman bull was a beast of burden, a sacrificial animal, a symbol of strength and fertility. It was not a punchline.
It was a god. Yet here we are, in the autumn of an empire, giggling at a stone penis. The restoration itself is technically excellent.
The colours are vivid, the tesserae precise. But the context is dead. The piazza is a travertine desert, surrounded by fast-food chains and clothing stores.
The bull sits like a severed head at a feast, disconnected from the body of history that gave it meaning. This is what intellectual decadence looks like: the ability to preserve the form while forgetting the content. We have become curators of a museum we no longer understand.
And the bemusement, the snickering, the viral trivialisation: that is the sound of a culture eating its own heritage for the last time. The Fall of Rome, after all, did not begin with barbarians at the gates. It began with Romans who had forgotten how to revere their own gods.
