The term Baby Girl Waiting (so called because she is depicted waiting for her now dead mother) traditionally indicates a funerary sculpture that adorns the metal aedicule of the Barsanti-Beretta family in the municipal cemetery of Viareggio. The monument, created in 1895 by the Carrara sculptor Ferdinando Marchetti, was designed by the client Eugenio Barsanti, one of the founders of the Viareggio Republican Party, to commemorate his young wife Clorinda Beretta inspired by the poem Everything returns by Giovanni Prati. For the statue he placed a daughter of the client, Paolina Barsanti. The work, which effectively combines realistic style and symbolic values, constitutes an interesting case of crystallization in the collective imagination of voices and stories, narrated both as facts believed to have really happened and with the awareness that they are legendary reworkings, around the motif of literary matrix of the child who awaits her now dead mother, handed down orally for entire generations of Viareggio. The sculpture underwent an important restoration work carried out by Massimo Moretti in 2013.
Theater
The waiting child is the title of a narration show by the actress-storyteller Elisabetta Salvatori inspired by the research on funerary sculpture and its traditions conducted by the writer and art historian Riccardo Mazzoni, responsible for the cataloging campaign of the sculptural and architectural heritage of the municipal cemetery on behalf of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, represented for the first time in the summer of 2005 in the scenario of Cava Barghetti, an abandoned marble quarry above Seravezza used as a performative space, as part of the EVOCAVA event conceived by Maurizio Guidi and Andrew Tessieri. Mazzoni himself made an archive history with the title What are you doing my child on that door, staged in the summer of 2007 with the actress Rebecca Palagi, the singer Samanta Barontini and the musician Adriano Barghetti in the ancient garden of the friars adjacent to the municipal cemetery with a final nocturnal visit to the legendary marble child
