It’s been a while since I wrote something personal here, something unplanned, full of detours. The kind of story that starts with a walk, a hunch, or a random turn down a street; not a media partnership or a planned post, just curiosity leading the way. Just me, a camera, a notebook, and the city unfolding. Somehow, a dead phone was what it took to get me writing like that again.
This text was born as a series of carousels with long captions on my Instagram page, but I’ve missed this kind of writing so much that I decided to publish it here on the blog as well, so it can stay.
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 1, Part 1 – Centocelle
My phone died right before the Big Rehearsal for the Rome Street Art Walks I’ll be hosting in December. No panic: I was around in the 1990s, I’ve got the know-how. Well, sort of. At the very least, I’ve got a notebook and a camera (in fact, the same one I used when I started the blog, back when I didn’t have a smartphone).
And so, as I embark on the first site inspection without Google Maps, I’m taking this as a creative nudge toward some old-school storytelling, because the first years of the Blocal Blog were exactly like this: me wandering around, taking photos with that same camera, jotting down notes and ideas in a notebook, and then going back home to make sense of it all.
And here we are, home, ready to spill everything out in a long caption, just like it’s 2011.
Let’s start from Centocelle, a neighbourhood in the eastern outskirts of Rome, where the streets are named after flowers and the multicultural community shows itself through restaurants and grocery stores filled with products from all over the world.
I walked for hours under the warm Roman October sun, the kind so typical it even has its own name: ottobrate romane. I had lunch at a vegan Palestinian restaurant and visited three different squats, some I’ve decided to include in the itinerary for my upcoming Rome book, others not.
But mostly, I kept thinking about how technological progress keeps making everything more frictionless, and how that’s not always a good thing. If I’d had my smartphone today, I’d probably have posted tons of stories, tagged the artists, and stopped there.
With this more cumbersome system (which, honestly, isn’t even that cumbersome; it’s not like I have to wait for a film roll to be developed), there’s a rhythm to things: a moment to take photos, a moment to look around, a moment to jot down notes, a moment to reflect on what I want to say, a moment to write, and only at the very end, a moment to post. And I realized that, with this system, I even have more things to say!
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 1, Part 2 – Tor Bella Monaca
Here I am again, back with the second dispatch from a week without a smartphone, a week of old-school micro-blogging, just like it’s 2011.
As I wrote yesterday (yes, it’s a series, and you’re meant to read it in order… let’s stop dumb-scrolling and start using the web actively again. I’m tired of playing it dumb online, just because attention spans have shrunk and nobody reads long captions anymore -or anything else, for that matter. A dumb audience kills my motivation to write, honestly).
Anyway, my blog was born exactly from this kind of urban exploration (the ones I used to do without a smartphone) and it’s probably been since those early days that I hadn’t been back to Tor Bella Monaca, Rome’s easternmost outskirts.
What brought me back here today was one of the many tours of Rome’s suburbs organised by the City Council for the Jubilee, with the idea of “decongesting” the historic centre and taking tourists to the outskirts. An idea that, as often happens when something is organised by the City of Rome, looks great on paper but fails miserably in execution.
For starters, there isn’t even a proper website or page collecting all the events in one place. The only other tour I managed to stumble upon (by accident, on Instagram) could only be booked by phone, by calling the City of Rome’s general contact centre, the same number you’d call for taxes, documents, or getting married. If this week I’m “stuck in the 1990s”, they’re stuck in the 1960s, and unfortunately for us Romans, not just for one week.
Anyway, the street art tour itself was really well put together by two local associations and led in a genuinely engaging way by visual artist Flavio Orlando, with a guest appearance from street artist Gofy, who created two of the works featured on the route.
As always, street art was just a way to talk about the neighbourhood, and Tor Bella Monaca (Italy’s most densely populated social housing area) is often portrayed by the media through stories of hardship and crime.
I found Flavio’s art-historical reading of the works particularly interesting, the way he connected the dots between ancient, modern, contemporary, and urban art. It made me think about how meaning keeps expanding: each person adds their own layer, and the wall becomes a mirror for whoever looks at it. How much we see, and how we see it, depends on who’s doing the talking. Maybe that’s why street art never really stays still.
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 2
Good morning and welcome back to my week-without-a-smartphone micro-blogging series.
Today was pretty uneventful, the kind of day I’d usually let slip by without any fuss here on social media. But not this week. This week is all about writing long captions and pairing them with photos taken with an actual camera.
So, here’s the deal: this morning I started working on the Lisbon street art book, and the first step is transcribing the two interviews I did last May, when I was in Lisbon for the crowdfunding trip, with local street artists Kampus and Jorge Charrua. The road ahead is long and uphill, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
After lunch, I moved to the kitchen table (this is what “working from home” truly means, BTW) and kept going for another couple of hours, until I decided it was time to get out and move my ass. So I hopped back on my bike for the first time this season (I stopped in spring).
I love the bike path that crosses the northern outskirts of Rome; it gets pretty wild pretty soon. As soon as you pass the stadium, it’s all nature, animals, and the river.
The path is also dotted with graffiti: look at that piece by JON, one of the pioneers of graffiti in Rome, or those letters by IMOS, so faithful to the original Roman style of the early days. Along the path there’s also one of Rome’s sweetest spots for trainspotting, where the regional trains passing by are always covered in graffiti from top to bottom.
Still, the ones that truly make me smile as I ride up and down are the pieces by Emans, whom I met in Portsmouth of all places. His characters cheer me up and keep me company, especially today, when I don’t have my usual podcast to listen to while I ride. This is probably the first time I’ve actually missed having a smartphone, with all its podcast apps. Turns out, silence isn’t as motivational as true crime.
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 3 and Day 4: Primavalle
I’m grouping Day 3 and Day 4 together because Day 3 was spent entirely in a horizontal position, working from my bed setup. And honestly, there was no other possible outcome after biking 20 km while completely out of shape.
Anyway, it was probably a good idea to rest my legs, because the weekend was meant to be a big site inspection to finalise the itineraries for the Rome Street Art Walks I’ll be leading in December (11–15) as part of the crowdfunding for my upcoming Rome street art book.
And yes, I’m saying “was meant to be” because that plan was made before I broke my phone, back when I could still rely on Google Maps, the step counter, the public transport app, the podcast app, and all those other little tools you don’t realise you depend on until they’re gone. But, as established on Day 1 of this no-smartphone experiment, offline explorations always turn out even better.
So, on Saturday morning I went to Primavalle, one of the most overlooked neighbourhoods in Rome, with that vintage aura that makes it feel stuck in the 1950s.
There I met a long-time reader of my blog, who bought both my street art books, and together we walked around the area so I could decide which murals to include in the walks (and therefore in the book) and which ones to leave out.
After that, I went to Parco del Pineto to unwind, then walked all the way back home to edit the photos and write down these lines.
In the evening, I headed out again to meet my friend Vittoria Benzine, an art journalist from New York, now in town for the Quadriennale. We had dinner at a cosy bistro near the Vatican, the perfect way to wrap up the day and recharge for what’s ahead: Sunday, a true street art marathon (which, by the way, is how participants to my walks have nicknamed my street art trips).
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 5, Part 1 – San Paolo
Sunday started slowly, catching up on my favourite newsletters from bed. Among them, I read one about AI slop and how, starting now and even more in the future, genuine human naivety will become a rare and precious commodity, that “fiercely independent impulse that pushes you to do something crazy just for the sake of experimenting and challenging yourself (and your readers).”
Which is exactly what I’m doing this week: living without a smartphone and documenting everything day by day with a camera and long, old-school micro-blogging captions, just like it’s 2011.
And so, reassured that what I’m actually producing here is rare and precious content — and not just wasting my time making my life unnecessarily complicated by doing site inspections without Google Maps and forcing myself into an inhuman posting schedule with daily carousels, long captions written in a language that isn’t even my mother tongue, and photos to select, edit, and post every single day — I felt good.
No, scratch that. I felt cool.
And so, feeling confident in how cool this whole thing actually is, I went out for the first site inspection of the day: San Paolo neighborhood, in the southern area of Rome. Grown around the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, today this area is defined by Roma Tre University and the student energy coming from it. Over the years, several urban regeneration projects have overlapped here, creating a bit of a mishmash of murals and initiatives curated by the City of Rome (and, as we’ve already established back on Day 1, they always look great on paper but fail miserably in execution).
For lunch, I stopped by Acrobax, one of the few squats in Rome still thriving. There was an anti-racism festival going on and, as usual, the All Reds rugby team was playing.
After lunch, I set off again for the second exploration of the day, heading towards Ostia, the seaside district of Rome, which we affectionately call Ostiangeles.
Stuck in the 90s for a Week: Day 5, Part 2 – Ostiangeles
From the San Paolo neighbourhood, I drove to Ostia, the seaside district of Rome. On this very hot Sunday afternoon, it felt like the whole city was here — biking, fishing, rollerblading, eating ice cream, reading a book, walking their dogs.
After doing the site inspection for our December Urban Walks, part of the crowdfunding for the Rome Street Art book, I joined a jam organised by my friends Mirko Pierri (curator) and Groove (street artist) in support of Palestine. Street artists from Rome and beyond gathered on Ostia’s public beach with sprays, rollers, brushes, and paints in the colours of the Palestinian flag, painting side by side.
It was one of those moments where street artists, graffiti writers, and activists all come together — feet in the sand, smiles all around. A truly beautiful event, and honestly, there couldn’t have been a better way to wrap up this little micro-blogging experiment, with captions as long as it were still 2011.
And even if starting tomorrow you’ll find me back on WhatsApp, there are a few lessons from this week I’m definitely keeping with me: that stories need time to unfold, and creativity thrives when things aren’t frictionless.
Logging off — well, technically logging back on, but this time, more inspired than ever.
