The walls of Florence are alive with graffiti.
When I open the giant wooden door of my apartment in Borgo Santa Croce, the blue face of a Renaissance-era girl stares back at me. Through snorkeling goggles.
She’s one of the many underwater portraits printed on paper and pasted around Florence by Blub, a local anonymous street artist.
The works of other well-known street artists live on cement walls and rusty metal boxes. In San Niccolo, Carla Bruttini’s red-headed woman with newspaper skin hugs her knees to her chest while she sleeps. A few blocks away, Exit Enter’s three red balloons fly across a wall toward a T-rex sporting a backwards hat and gold chain.
Street art has made its mark on the historical Tuscan city, but not everyone is as amused as I am.
Since the dawn of hip-hop culture in 1970s New York City, urban areas around the world have both celebrated and demonized graffiti. The debate rages between generations of artists on where to draw the line between art and vandalism.
Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance and the home of the world’s greatest master artists, is no exception to the art world’s modern controversy. What is the difference between graffiti and street art? Is street art vandalism? Is street art art?
Italy as a whole has a love-hate relationship with graffiti. Some Italians have a hate-hate relationship with it.
In an op-ed piece for The Florentine, writer Robert Nordvall gives his take: “Graffiti on the
beautiful buildings of Florence is more discordant than it is on buildings in an already degraded neighbourhood of the Bronx in New York. If it is a graver aesthetic assault here, then what are the prospects for taming this plague in Florence?”
He didn’t have to take a jab at the Bronx like that, but the idea that graffiti has no place in historic cities like Florence is a popular one. It’s also an exhausted legal issue.
In 2008, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cracked down on graffiti to save Italy’s public image because "in some of our cities, it feels as though we're in Africa rather than Europe."
Interesting.
According to the New York Times, anti-graffiti measures raised fines from over €2,000 to €30,000 and a maximum of 40 days of prison time for defacing historic monuments. However,
Italy’s legal system is so overwhelmed, graffiti cases rarely go to court.
Despite the potential legal trouble, Florence’s street and graffiti artists have made names for themselves by bringing their unique styles to the masses.
Blub, for example, re-imagines Renaissance paintings and famous figures as snorkelers. His work is easily recognizable, and includes important historical figures ranging from Botticelli’s Venus, Abraham Lincoln to Amy Winehouse.
Exit Enter’s stick figures and red balloons float around the city. Unlike Blub, who makes prints of his art and pastes the paper onto walls, Exit Enter draws his designs straight onto the surface. Alongside his little figures, which sometimes wear crowns or feathers, are his signature red balloons and hearts. The artist’s style is so simple it’s elegant.
Ache77 is fond of a brooding, beautiful woman with slicked-back hair and strong eyebrows. Ache77 specializes in large-scale portraits; his Instagram features the faces of Dante Alighieri, the David, and a mural of Alicia Keys.
Carla Bruttini has been painting for as long as she can remember. Seriously, she could not give me a specific time in her life she began painting.
“For me, it is natural to be an artist,” she said.
Florence’s history of public art goes hand-in-hand with how street artists view their work. The city of Florence created the Loggia dei Lanzi, which sits outside of the Palazzo Vecchio, as an open-air gallery featuring original Renaissance statues for the public to enjoy free of charge.
Florence has always been about art for the people. At least in theory.
“Each place, each town, there is a past -- passato,” Bruttini said. “There’s an energy in each city. It’s not a coincidence that here were born many great artists recognized in the world from the Renaissance.”
Although Bruttini doesn’t consider herself a full-time street artist, she has shared her studio space, Dhai Studio, with a handful of street artists for nine years. She collaborates with artists like Blub, Exit Enter and Ache77.
“At the beginning, I wanted to share this studio with other artists because I live to share, to have a moving space,” Bruttini said.
She mainly works on canvas, but often reproduces a female figure she calls the red-headed shaman. Bruttini paints the shaman on newspaper, which she cuts out and pastes around Florence. The shaman represents freedom and feminine power.
In an effort to corral graffiti, Florence’s local government designated certain areas for street artists and muralists to paint as they please. Although she appreciates the idea, Bruttini said controlled spaces miss the point graffiti artists try to make: freedom.
Gianluca Milli, a curator for Street Levels Gallery, couldn’t agree more.
Street Levels Gallery challenges what type of art belongs in a gallery by featuring the work of international street artists on its concrete walls. The space acts as a creative hub and positive community for young street artists and graffiti lovers.
“It was all born out of a passion,” Milli said.
Street Levels is the only urban art gallery in Tuscany, he said. The space is home to its public gallery and studio for its five in-house artists.
It opened two years ago with an exhibition featuring 18 local street artists, according to The Florentine. Since then, it has featured a new artist to exhibit once a month.
From May 12 to June 12, Street Levels is displaying an installation by Hopnn Yuri, a local street artist. Hopnn’s most recent work critiques Florence’s haphazard attempts to “clean up” graffiti by arming groups of volunteers with off-white wall paint. The Angeli del Bello, which translates to Angels of Beauty, go around the city painting over graffiti tags.
Hopnn's framed illustrations on display in Street Levels Gallery.
When wall painters paint over graffiti, they leave behind streaky sections of paint. Not only does the paint color rarely match the rest of the wall, it also does a poor job of covering up graffiti. What’s left is an ugly splotch of mustard spread thinly over the ghost of a graffiti tag.
It looks worse than it did before, Milli said.
“This shows how there are people in the world who don’t know what graffiti is, and not only do you erase it, but in reality, you also worsen the streets,” he said.
Hopnn’s work depicts the wall painters erasing famous graffiti, like Keith Haring’s murals and the neanderthal cave paintings of France. Like the gallery itself, Hopnn urges the viewer to question what counts as graffiti and what counts as beauty.
“In Florence there isn't yet the mentality to interpret graffiti or street art as contemporary art,” Milli said. “We are stuck in the Renaissance, and the potential of other things is not seen. We live entirely, and exclusively, of the Renaissance.”
