ART

Plans to erect a 13-foot-tall, bikini-clad statue of American pop star Madonna in Pacentro, the Italian home of her grandparents, were scrapped on Wednesday after a long-running dispute with local officials. The president of the Naples-based “Friends of Show Business” organization, Gianni Volpe, said the statue would instead be taken on a worldwide tour after its completion. Pacentro Mayor Raffaele Santini said that’s fine with him: “I hope they’ll leave us in peace now. . . . We’ve wasted too much precious time on this when we’ve got other more serious things to do here.” Madonna, whose real name is Louise Veronica Ciccone, met some of her distant relations during a sellout concert tour of Italy last summer but has never visited Pacentro.