Milan's Iconic Bull Loses Its Tail — and Its Luck

A restoration of Milan's celebrated bronze bull has removed the animal's testicles, triggering a backlash among locals who consider the genitalia essential to the statue's supposed powers of good fortune. The controversy has spread from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II to social media platforms, where critics are calling the animal an ox rather than a bull.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanaeurope4-minute read31 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

The bronze bull that has occupied the floor of Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II since the shopping arcade opened in 1867 is, by most accounts, missing something it has always had. A restoration completed in late May 2026 removed the animal's testicles — a detail so small it might escape a first-time visitor but one that carries genuine cultural weight in a city where rubbing the bull's genitalia for good luck is less a superstition than an institution.

The backlash arrived swiftly. By 2026-05-31, social media platforms were flooded with before-and-after comparisons, the consensus among critics landing somewhere between disappointment and mock solemnity: the bull had been castrated, reduced to what one widely shared post described as "un bue" — an ox, a draught animal, stripped of the virility the statue is supposed to channel.

The tradition is peculiar, even by Italian standards. Step into the Galleria at almost any hour and you will find visitors positioning themselves on the bull's hindquarters, spinning anticlockwise with one hand on the animal's rear. The gesture is meant to channel the bull's vigour — and, by some accounts, to transfer it elsewhere. Milanese locals speak of it with a mixture of bemusement and genuine affection. The practice has featured in travel guides, celebrity Instagram posts, and at least one prominent film; American actor George Clooney, who owns a villa on Lake Como, has reportedly performed the ritual.

What the restoration was intended to accomplish is less disputed. The bronze has accumulated grime, oxidation, and surface damage over more than a century of foot traffic. Conservation work was necessary; the gallery's management, the Palazzo Marino cultural office, had justified the project on those grounds alone. What was not widely publicised in advance was the specific decision to fill the small voids where the bull's testicles had been — or to omit replacing them altogether, depending on which version of events one credits.

The gap between institutional rationale and public expectation points to a familiar problem in heritage management: the tendency to treat physical preservation and cultural practice as separate concerns. The bronze will last longer without the friction and handling that the genitalia invite. The logic is sound from a materials-science standpoint. It is less sound from the standpoint of a tradition that has survived precisely because it requires physical engagement with the object.

Social media has compressed the distance between those two perspectives into something confrontational. The images circulating — a bull intact, a bull incomplete — carry their argument without needing elaboration. One side sees sensible conservation; the other sees an act of cultural erasure dressed up as maintenance. Neither framing is wrong, exactly. Both are incomplete.

The Palazzo Marino office has not issued a formal statement as of the afternoon of 2026-05-31, according to reports from the Corriere della Sera newsroom, which first flagged the controversy on its Telegram channel earlier that morning. The absence of official comment has left the dispute to play out in the open, which is perhaps appropriate: the bull belongs to the public in a way that bureaucratic process rarely acknowledges.

What happens next is unclear. Options range from a quiet reversal — a discreet restoration of what was removed — to a more elaborate intervention that acknowledges both the physical integrity of the object and the symbolic weight it carries. There is precedent, elsewhere in Italy, for heritage sites that have negotiated similar tensions between preservation and popular practice. The outcome will depend on whether officials choose to treat the controversy as a communications problem or as a genuine question about what the bull is actually for.

The deeper question is what the incident reveals about the relationship between cities and their eccentric monuments. Milan's bull was never designed to be touched, let alone rubbed for luck. It was cast as part of a grand commercial arcade, a piece of civic boosterism dressed in Egyptian symbolism — the astrological bull corresponding to the zodiac of Milan's founding myth. What it became, through decades of unsupervised use, is something else: a living tradition, dependent on the very contact that endangers it. Managing that paradox requires more than a conservator's touch. It requires a reckoning with what the city actually wants from its own history.

For now, the bull stands — incomplete, contested, and, by most measures, still drawing crowds. Whether visitors continue to seek out what remains of the old ritual, or whether the controversy deters the behaviour entirely, is a question only the coming weeks will answer.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/CorriereDellaSera/42651
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toro_egizio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Vittorio_Emanuele_II