In 1927 the competition for the design of the Palace of Nations in Geneva was announced, and the project

of the team of architects including Carlo Broggi and Jozsef Vago was chosen.

The Beaux Arts French neoclassical style was chosen. The works began in 1931 and ended in 1938. Subsequently, in the 1950s and 1960s it was enlarged.

Up until the 1930s, the management of the main members of the American Woodrow Wilson Foundation,

whose president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

thought about the possibility of donating a monument to be placed in the park of the building, which is the seat of the League Nations. The idea took shape in 1935, when the famous sculptor Paul Manship was contacted.

His first proposal was to model and then cast a monumental door for the assembly hall in bronze. The project was not successful. At that period Manship had fallen in love with the armillary spheres and was studying them, such as the very complex and gigantic armillary sphere built in 1593 by Antonio Santucci (cosmographer of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I dei Medici) at the Galileo Museum in Florence,

and then proposed a large Celestial Sphere in bronze with a steel frame, whose surface was made up of the sculptures of all the zodiacal constellations in lost wax bronze cast with and gilded; the sphere had to have an astronomical rotary movement like that of the earth’s axis.

The construction of the astronomical monument presented many problems, and was entrusted to the Vignali foundry in Florence, which began construction,

directed by the founder-restorer Bruno Bearzi.

For Manship too, the creation of the model had been no small feat.

The work was finished in 1939: in August of that year the Celestial Sphere left the foundry in Florence for Geneva. A tractor brought the railway wagon to the station.

The work was installed in the center of a pool with water in the part of the park near the Palace.

The rotation mechanism of the monument worked for a short time, and after a while the sphere was blocked. Weather conditions soon altered and abraded the gilding of the sculptures. The approximately 1,000 little stars applied to the sculptures have partly detached and lost.

In 2019 the management of the United Nations Palace had issued a tender for the restoration of the work, and had invited the various participants to visit the Celestial Sphere up close. Ferdinando Marinelli Jr., owner of the homonymous Artistic Foundry in Florence and the Galleria Pietro Bazzanti in Florence, together with the stainless steel construction specialist Carlo Lanaro,

analysed the state of deterioration of the work and began to study the best systems to restore the Sphere to its original beauty and functionality. The damage that a clumsy restoration of the year 1983 had added to those due to bad weather (oxidation, sulphating, loss of gilding and of the underlying bolus, rusting of the parts of the steel frame, improper welding, etc.) were also clearly seen, such as the concrete filling of the bronze base, etc. In 2003 two of the sculptures of the Sphere were regilded to begin the final restoration but the project was interrupted. Before the assignment of the work, the United Nations commission asked to see and analyse the previous restoration that the Ferdinando Marinelli Foundry had carried out on the bronze sculptures of the Triton Fountain in Valletta, for the Malta Government

In 1984 I was very lucky enough to meet the Architect Dudi Berretti in Florence, on the occasion of the creation of the bronze sculpture “Fountain of the Two Oceans” for San Diego in California. A character of unique sympathy and delicacy.

We quickly became friends. The friendship was cemented when I went, with the sculptor friend Sergio Benvenuti, creator of the model of the fountain,

to assemble the two statues in San Diego, at the foot of a skyscraper built by one of the many companies of Patrick Bowlen , said Pat.

After the job, back in Florence, for a long time I didn’t hear from the friend Dudi.
During the frequent gargantuan dinners made with Sergio Benvenuti, a great eater, we wondered where Dudi had ended up.

The answer came sixteen years later: one morning in 2000 Dudi appeared in Galleria Bazzanti, with his usual radiant smile. Kisses and hugs, immediately for lunch together; “Also call Sergio Benvenuti” he told me. Dudi was born in Fiesole, just outside Florence, and he had studied in Florence. After a few libations he threw in an idea: as he was following the construction of a new stadium for the city of Denver in Colorado financed by Pat Bowlen, and since the football team of the city was owned by Bowlen, he would have liked to have a monument in Florence to be placed outside the stadium.
We were having lunch in a fifteenth-century palace in town, in the restaurant of a famous ancient family producing splendid wines, at our table the empty bottles rapidly increased. Dudi then began to talk about a bronze colossus like that of Rhodes, 40 meters high which, with legs apart, to be the entrance of the cars in the parking of the stadium. The dessert, a delicious trifle, had led to something more probable and achievable: a series of horses of the Broncos breed, which was the name of the Denver team, of which Pat Bowlen was president and owner. I went back to the foundry with Sergio, Dudi went to the hotel to sleep.
The following day, another lunch: Dudi, Sergio and me. We went to Monteriggioni, another big lunch, other wine.

At the café Sergio with his big hands removed everything from the table, and opened a folder with a handful of drawings he had made during the night: a series of seven Broncos horses that ran towards the stadium going up the course of a torrent. Dudi lit up with a beaming smile, made Sergio get up and hugged him. Then he looked at me and asked “can it be done?” and when I replied “certainly” he hugged me too and started laughing with happiness and exclaimed “the fountain of the Broncos horses!”
Two days later Dudi was back in Denver with Sergio’s drawings to propose the Broncos ‘fountain’.
After another two days Dudi called me around midnight, for him it was early afternoon, telling me to have a small model of the horses and the fountain made, and to call him as soon as it was ready. Sergio had an exceptional sculptural ability, and in half a day he had prepared the small clay model.

The following week Dudi was back in Florence with the landscape architect to examine with Sergio the enlarged sketches of the fountain in the foundry.

hey were enthusiastic;

and they were also enthusiastic about the lunches of those days.

Sergio Benvenuti began modeling one big horse after another in clay, whose waxes were made and retouched in the foundry, then castings and assemblies.

During the execution of Dudi’s frequent visits, each time accompanied by an increasing number of various technicians, happy to spend a few days in Tuscany, lunches and dinners were everyone’s favorite pastime.

When the bronze horses began to be packed, Pat Bowlen also visited us in Hawaiian shirt.

Then we all moved to Denver, me, my wife, Sergio Benvenuti and various technicians from the foundry, to assemble the horses bronze statues, one and a half times the size of the originals, at the stadium.
We were welcomed like heads of state: at the immigration office, when they knew that we were the “Broncos horses men” they let us pass immediately shanking our hands: some team manager had sent our data in advance to the competent offices
.

The assembling lasted about ten days

in which Dudi accompanied us on a visit to the town and, mainly, to visit the best restaurants in the city.

Finally the solemn inauguration.

Dudi was fascinated not only by Sergio Benvenuti’s ability to model large fountains with subjects requested by the client, but also by the creations that Benvenuti performed for himself: a series of dancers, often colored, in various dance poses. Sergio was fascinated by the world of dance, and had taken Dudi to his studio in Chianti, where the dancers were exhibited, cast in bronze by the Ferdinando Marinelli Foundry.
In a few hours, by telephone, together with Pat Bowlen, Dudi organized an exhibition of Sergio’s dancers and other sculptures made by him in large and elegant tents in Denver near the Broncos Stadium. The exhibition was a great success, so much so that all the sculptures exhibited were sold in a few days.

Some models are exhibited at the Bazzanti Gallery.

“Under the Sun”

“Dancer with blouse”

“Dancer jumping the rope”

“Dancer on the stilts”

“Sitting dancer”

“The cat’s craddle”

“Resting dancer”

“Merry go Round”

“Relax”

“Summer waiting”

“Serenade”