Graffiti: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

May 21, 2006

Italy has long suffered the plague of graffiti: the 30,000 year old rock carvings in Valcamonica were embellished milennia later by Roman soldiers, and the Romans' monuments in turn have been scratched up by centuries of tourists. But not until recent years have graffitists had access to spray paint.

Milan, like most cities, is the target of "writers" (as they are called - using the English word - by Italians). Most of what you see on buildings is done in haste and merely uglifies. But, here and there, where the work has been done with permission (or at least without risk of interruption), you find some beautiful pieces. There's even a long wall outside a school in the southern part of the city where the students' (I suppose) designs were transformed into mosaics.

Small shops in Italian cities are closed with roll-down steel shutters (saracinesche), which are uniformly dull gray and far from beautiful. Some shop owners, rather than have their saracinesche covered in rude illicit scribblings, apparently chose to co-opt the writers, hiring them to paint cartoony illustrations of the shops' wares or services. Proud of their work, the artists then leave those shutters alone.

There seems to be a constant battle over the trains. Graffiti appears - some of it beautiful - and disappears rapidly; I've never seen the same piece twice, although the train carriages I ride are the same ones almost every day.The ferrovie (railway companies) must be spending a fortune to clean them; they'd do better to let the graffiti stay. After all, the basic paint job on most trains is old and cracked, and wasn't that beautiful to begin with - dull beige with blue and green trim. The bright colors of the graffiti are an improvement, and the designs are usually harmless words or art names - nothing rude that I've seen so far, and usually abstracted to the point that it's hard to make them out anyway.

I do object to those artists who cover up the train windows entirely, which is definitely annoying for passengers. But most do not, or the design encroaches on the window just enough to add visual interest without blocking the view.

If the railways could simply let the best graffiti stay, they'd save us all money, and add a spot of color to the daily commute.

Jul, 2007 - For financial or whatever reasons, the Italian railways are no longer cleaning the trains so assiduously...