New York’s Icon: The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty, inaugurated in 1886, is a symbol of New York City and the entire United States of America, and one of the most important and well-known monuments in the world. It is located at the entrance to the Hudson River harbor in the middle of Manhattan Bay, on rocky Liberty Island in upstate New York. The name of the work is The Liberty Enlightening the World (Liberty Enlightening the World in English, La Liberté éclairant le monde in French). It was created by the Frenchman Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, with the collaboration of Gustave Eiffel, who designed the interior; the statue consists of an internal reticular structure in steel and externally covered by 300 sheets of copper shaped and riveted together, it rests on a gray-pink granite base that was long thought to be of Sardinian origin, although recent research has disproved the origin of the rock from the island of La Maddalena and brought it back to the quarry of Stony Creecy in Connecticut. With its 93 metres of height (including the base), dominating the entire bay of Manhattan in New York, it is perfectly visible up to 40 kilometres away. It depicts a woman wearing a long robe and proudly holding a torch in her right hand (symbol of the eternal fire of freedom), while in the other she holds a table bearing the date of American Independence Day (July 4, 1776); at her feet are broken chains (symbol of liberation from the power of the despotic ruler) and on her head is a crown, whose seven points represent the seven seas and seven continents. The statue represents the goddess Reason, whose torch symbolizes Masonic knowledge.