Stand under Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus in Piazza della Signoria and look up. Hercules has a fistful of Cacus’s hair. Cacus is down on one knee, face tipped upward, parked right at Hercules’s hip with his mouth half open. From below, the two heads and Hercules’s genitals stack into a single vertical line. My first thought wasn’t triumph. It looked like the moment before a forced sex act. I don’t think that’s a dirty mind at work.

The marble standing at the door of Palazzo Vecchio has been there since 1910, and most of the people photographing it have no idea. Michelangelo’s David left the square in 1873, moved on rails through the streets to the Galleria dell’Accademia, where it now stands under a purpose-built skylight at the end of a ticketed queue. What replaced it is a copy by Luigi Arrighetti, set in the exact spot the original held for 369 years.