When I was 7 years old, the TRV Crew started tagging the walls of Rome. That’s how all this began for me; as an innocent hunt down the rabbit hole of Rome’s earliest graffiti scene. Little did I know that, almost 30 years later, I would once again be walking on TRV’s footsteps by going from Rome to Amsterdam, where I met Nico.
Saying that Palermo is worse off is a gross understatement. Palermo’s palaces are, at best, beaten up, but in any other scenario they’re outright shattered. Yet their crumbling facades, which the North African sun and the sea breeze keep eroding daily, are what make Palermo so seductive.
Palermo walls are full of writing. Graffiti and street art, sure, but also sprayed messages with no artistic ambition whatsoever -just the urge to declare one’s love.
I was constantly impressed by how much of the everyday conversation goes on the walls of the city, where messages of love are sprayed next to graffiti and street art.
Here are my favorite love messages:
There is a no-place in Montesilvano where cars, trains, bikes and pedestrians frequently cross. Multi-level linear paths all intersect her before carrying on their trajectory towards the vanishing points. There is a beautiful park on both sides, and the blue sea rests not too far away, although once you are caught up in the traffic that flows through Sottopasso Aldo Moro, all you can hear is the noise of the cars, whose engines roar through the two tunnels that serve as the entrance and exit of the city, and a train clanking past every twenty minutes or so.
“That one is you, always glued to your phone!”
“C’mon, I’m not that fat! Or am I?” he asked Jaune, who was stencilling yet another garbage man on Gaeta’s “Isola Ecologica”.