THE BATTERY PARK EAGLE

At Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan, the imposing silhouette of a bronze eagle dominates the skyline. With its wings spread in a solemn dive, it seems to defy the winds of the Atlantic Ocean. Weighing roughly five tons and standing almost twenty feet tall, it is the beating heart of the East Coast Memorial, the monument honoring those who fell in the Atlantic waters during World War II. Cast in 1961, this monumental work was dedicated on May 23, 1963, by a man destined for history:

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Behind the majesty of that eagle lies the extraordinary and little-known story of Albino Manca, a sculptor born in 1897 in Tertenia, a rugged and untamed village in Sardinia, who trained in Rome at the Vittoriano worksites. Permanently emigrating to New York in 1938 and settling in Greenwich Village, Manca was an artist of astonishing eclecticism: beyond sculpting colossal bronzes, he collaborated with silversmith Alphonse LaPaglia to create jewelry for major brands like Jensen, and in 1965, he was even chosen to mint the official gold medal for Pope Paul VI's historic visit to the United Nations.

His bond with his homeland, however, never broke. In fact, a moving anecdote connects America and Sardinia: Albino Manca chose to gift his small hometown of Tertenia a scaled-down reproduction of his Diving Eagle, which stands today in Piazza Kennedy. An invisible thread, forged of bronze and memory, that forever links the skyscrapers of New York to the Ogliastra mountains in Sardinia.