There is a lot of graffiti in Italy. Some consider it art, come consider it vandalism, some claim it’s another sigh that our millennial generation is getting apart all that is good in our once civilized world.
Kay said when she came here 5 years ago there was hardly any graffiti at all. I wonder what happened. Was it politics, popular culture, an economic slump?
Regardless of people’s opinion, Rome, and all of Italy is a land of recycled artifacts. Everything you see was either built on top of everything else or built out of something else they tore apart. A new emperor comes into power and he plasters his seal over ancient buildings and right over the symbols of rulers who came before him. When Augustus made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, temples, art, and monuments that stood for centuries and took hundreds of years to build were torn down or built right on top of. Shannon told me when Bernini constructed the Baldachin, a giant sculpture in the middle of St. Peter’s, the melted almost every Roman bronze sculpture they could find in Rome in order to build the Baldachin. Centuries of art lost for one sculpture inside a single building. If you go to Florence, there is a a face carved into brick on a street corner. It was done by Michelangelo when he was a kid. He carved it, unauthorized, on the side of a palace. The concept of graffiti, and the problems people have with it, seems like nothing new. It may seem ugly to us, but so did Van Gogh’s Starry Night to art critics of the 19th century.”
Blog writing and images by Tyler
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