Il Porcellino outside Sydney Hospital, January 2021. Photo by Maksym Kozlenko, via Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.

A bronze boar on Macquarie Street with a snout rubbed to gold. Rub it and drop a coin: the luck is yours, the coin is the hospital’s.

Il Porcellino has sat outside Sydney Hospital since 1968, a larger-than-life wild boar resting on his left haunch, dark all over except the nose. He is an exact copy of Pietro Tacca’s seventeenth-century bronze in Florence, which was itself modelled on a Hellenistic marble in the Uffizi. Tacca’s original now lives in a museum; the boar in Florence’s market today is a replica too.

Look down. He stands over a small pool crowded with bronze tortoises, snakes, frogs, snails, lizards and crabs, and the custom is the Florentine one: rub the nose, drop a coin into the pool, have good luck. The difference is where the coins go. In Sydney they are collected for the hospital, more than $500,000 by his fiftieth birthday, which is why staff call him their “silent volunteer”.

The gift is a family one. Marchesa Clarissa Torrigiani, Sydney-born and living in Florence, gave him in memory of her father, Thomas Fiaschi, and her brother, Piero, both honorary surgeons at Sydney Hospital. Thomas was born in Florence in 1853, joined the hospital in 1890, and ran field hospitals in the Boer War and at Lemnos in the First World War. A Florentine boar at his hospital’s door closes the circle. When the boar turned fifty, about seventy of Clarissa’s descendants came to the party, some of them from Florence.

What to know: he sits in the hospital forecourt facing Macquarie Street, free and always there, with the sandstone of Australia’s oldest hospital behind him. The paperwork is slightly muddled: the City of Sydney lists him as installed in 1968 but formally presented on 16 December 1969. Conservators cleaned and recoated him for the City in 2016 and re-lettered his worn plaques; the gold on the nose is the public’s work, and it keeps coming back.