Matador’s Tom Gates goes off on the lameness of graffiti in Florence.
In what seems like less than a decade, Firenze’s famous beauty and charm has gone directly into the crapper.
The city has never been particularly effective at fighting miscreant ink but now it’s turned into a real doghouse. The markings are everywhere, even eye level on the walls around the Duomo. Alleyways and small streets are tagged dozens of times. Many large, wooden doors are blasted with paint. Signs are hardest hit, rendering bus schedules useless at many stops.
It seems like a great time to be a police officer in Florence. There are endless amounts of tourist photos to be taken, plenty of texts to be written and bottomless espressos to be sipped from tiny paper cups.
Cops in the city center socialize in circles, looking as if they might break out a hackysack at any moment. Bus and train station rent-a-cops seem to come standard with headphones and MP3 players. They all love to whistle.
Perhaps the police’s apathy makes Taggers work harder for attention. The words don’t support this theory though. They are banal tags, mostly names and initials.
There is no hint of artistic aspiration, like with the murals of Santiago or the clever Banksy’s that turn up in London. One can only picture 15 year old nimrods doing what 15 year old nimrods do; defacing and running.
It’s a frustrating thing, the lack of purpose involved in all of this. It makes the streets look like the set of a bad 1980’s rap video. There’s no “fuck the police” or political statement, no reason given for the defamation of centuries-old buildings. It’s just a bunch of crap spray painted on a wall.
One person seems obsessed with tagging the word “yogurt”, as many as ten times in a five block radius of The Uffizi. Another person has taken to simply dumping buckets of paints on ATM’s.
There is probably much that I don’t know about the war on graffiti here. Police squads that roam the street at night. Or perhaps a commission has been called.
Maybe the mayor isn’t taking 3 hour lunches and instead sits in his office, pining over how his city is being devalued. Maybe the tourism commission, whose Information Points are even tagged up, are not operating with blinders on.
Maybe there’s a master plan in the works to make Florence beautiful again, to make it look less like the inside of a toilet stall.
Or maybe nobody gives a shit.
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7 Comments... join the discussion!
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“Or maybe nobody gives a shit.”
That’s the point.
Anyway it’s not just Florence… Probably only Venice is a bit “cleaner”.
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yogurt.
That kills me.
I lived with a Graffiti artists ( he actually would do huge, amazing pieces ) and I was fascinated by his all consuming obession with scribbling his name everywhere.Getting up.
It meant everything. I think is was a need to be recognized, if only despised.
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Man, after spending a day in Valparaiso, Chile–the polar opposite on the graffiti spectrum–I have to agree. Florence looks like shit.
Seriously, check this stuff out:
http://kecia-chile-agosto2008.blogspot.com/2008/08/valpo-graffiti-art.html↵ -
I think the citizens of Firenze feel so hopeless after a decade or so of “non-contributing” immigrants over-running their city, that they just don’t care anymore. I think you would not find that the graffiti is being painted by the “local Italian boys”.
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Nice piece! I’m not sure if it’s so much about a need to be recognised in public though Josh. I also know a few graffers and if judged on the sheer number of tags they leave everywhere or some of the places they pick to do a piece, you could easily think they were just doing it to gain attention. But in my experience most graf writers only come out at night, and keep their work secret. Most tags are only known to a select few other graffers. It’s more about getting one over on the other guys in the graffiti scene in town by spraying the biggest most daring piece or tagging your name on the most corners and telephone boxes. BTW – I have to agree that it sucks when it’s done on beautiful old buildings…
As for Italy, i actually have to agree with the author in saying that “probably nobody gives a shit”. Italy is an amazing country for so many reasons, but it really lags behind most of the rest of Europe when it comes to keeping towns looking beautiful and doing things for the common good. But maybe thats part of the charm!
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I just got back from Florence, if you think the thousands of “yogurt” graffitis are obnoxious try going to Rome. Its bad enough to deface Piazzale Di Michelangelo but the Colloseum! Come on! It is everywhere BUT the Vatican. I think the natives have a very lax attitude towards it, I guess they figure that if the buildings have survived 600 years that they can survive graffiti too. From what I gathered it was a problem that the college students have with the “Police State” but I found that they are more liberated than anyone I know in the US.
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