At last, I’ve explored the area in the province of Frosinone, finding three ghost towns and one abandoned paper factory.
The greatest feature of these three ghost towns is that they all overlook a beautiful valley, which made me wonder why someone would ever have left that panoramic position. This was before reaching them by driving along the steepest and most uneven hill roads ever, which -eventually- made everything perfectly clear. ;-)
‘Listen’, ‘Pss’, ‘Grr’. So many voices are coming out from the funnels hung on the ceiling that I can’t hear mine. Suddenly, everything is quiet for a few seconds, but even the silence –at this point- gets me muddled. Then, again, more voices are calling to me: ‘Look’, ‘Ehi’, ‘Pss’, ‘Woof’. Calls, bleary sounds, background noises that were scattered through the days of those people who used to live inside this very building, the psychiatric hospital of Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome.
‘I was pretty tense about this mural’ he said ‘You know, portraying someone like Pasolini… and, moreover, in a location like this one’ he added, pointing to the ruins of the Mira Lanza factory in the beautiful, post-industrial yard of Teatro India.
‘Well, you nailed it!’ I replied in my over-enthusiastic voice.
‘I guess so… I mean, now I’m satisfied with the result, but you should’ve seen me when I was approaching the job: I was so nervous!’
Happy Halloween folks! :-)
I’ve crafted a special post for this occasion, which features my favourite cemeteries in Rome: from the hidden gem under the viaduct to the lovely Protestant cemetery where Keats and Shelley are buried, without forgetting the monumental cemetery of Rome, which is an open-air museum itself.
Enjoy the most eternal side of the Eternal City!
Last week someone who had read my enthusiastic post about street art in Lisbon dropped me a line to let me know that one of those street artists featured in my article was painting his first mural in Rome at that very moment.
And that’s how I met Diogo Machado (aka AddFuel) and the two street art lovers behind the Forgotten Project: Hugo Dias and Alessandra Arpino.