Tallahassee, Florida - The school principal in Florida who was forced to resign after displaying an image of Michelangelo's David statue is to be invited to visit Florence, the Italian city home to the famous original.

Mayor Dario Nardella tweeted that he planned to invite the teacher, named in the media as Hope Carrasquilla, principal at a school in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida, to pay tribute to her in the name of Florence.

"Confusing art with pornography is simply ridiculous," Nardella tweeted.

Carrasquilla left her post at the school after a parent complained that showing an image of the naked David was "pornographic."

The school board gave her the choice of resigning or being fired.

Carrasquilla told the Huffington Post that there had been "a series of miscommunications" concerning a letter that should have gone out to parents warning them that pupils would be shown Renaissance art.

The director of the dell'Accademia, the Florence museum where the David stands, expressed amazement. "That's absurd. Nudity is not the same as pornography," Cecilie Hollberg told the Italian daily La Repubblica.

The David statue was the symbol of the Renaissance, placing humankind in the immaculate state created by God at the focus, she said. The David was in any case a religious figure.

"To manufacture an association with pornography one must have a distorted imagination," Hollberg said.

The statue of David, sculpted in white marble between 1501 and 1504, is the most famous tourist attraction in the medieval city. It was moved to the museum in 1873 after gracing the city's Palazzo Vecchio for years.

The sculpture shows the Old Testament hero with his sling about to take on the giant Goliath.