Rome Is a Real City, a World City, and It Has Graffiti Everywhere

This is Rome. There’s graffiti everywhere. All over new buildings, all over newish buildings, all over ancient buildings. It’s just how the city rolls. And one day in the middle of last month (March, 2024), I found, while walking the streets of central Rome (the Vatican 30 minutes away by foot; the timeless Tiber just across the section of Lungotevere named after the Renaissance artist who gave us the fresco that famously captured the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Raffaello Sanzio), a dizzying concentration of graffiti on the Via della Lungaretta that seemed almost sacred.  This is how Giulia, a blogger for a site devoted to Rome’s “street art and graffiti,” Blocal, describes this wall, which is also next to Piazza di Santa Maria: In Trastevere, there are five walls of poster art whose visual impact is nothing less than that of the most famous murals of Rome. The best known of which is in Via della Lungaretta, sharing a corner with Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Here, Italian and international street artists have been “cultivating” a wall for years that, much like a vegetable garden, changes according to the seasons in an organic and spontaneous way. Spontaneity is the...