i muri non finisco mai

“We are frequencies”

To write on the walls of the city is to claim it for yourself. It is to say I exist, I think, I feel. And when the city cleans its walls and washes your text away, it turns a page in its own book inviting you to come back with a new pen and a new thought. To write is to resist the passing of time.

"A quale diavolo ti vendi?"

They're remaking Bologna into a food destination. The tourists are squeezing themselves onto seats, under arches and by busy streets, to scoff fresh pasta and plates of dried meats and cheeses. They're taking photos of their food. They're taking photos of the people in the windows making pasta. A traditional skill becomes a social media memory. All the while around them is the city's most precious offering: walls covered in words, throw-ups, scribbles, and tags that offer a constantly evolving conversation between people and city.

Bologna's walls are a tapestry of oranges, pinks, reds, and yellows. And in parts of town this tapestry is covered in all sorts of writing. Occasionally you'll come across a break in the tapestry. A piece of wall has been washed, leaving behind an ill fitting box of a slightly different shade. It never matches the rest of the wall. The act of hiding the writing makes its previous existence all the more obvious, like a torn page from a book. Dark colored sprays push from under fresh coats of paint, like ink bleeding from one page to the next as you turn your diary to spill thoughts somewhere else than in your brain. To write is to escape yourself in a way. It's to claim victory over a part of yourself. Red bricks made for good backdrops.

"Follow the BPM"

"I martiri non muorono mai"

Crews shout each other across walls, arches, and back streets. Someone insults everyone's parents. Another asks a rhetorical question. Yet another claims their undying love for someone else. And on and on it goes. Who listens? Who acknowledges? To write is to put yourself out there uncertain as to what the response will be. To scribble on the walls is to take this logic to an extreme, it is to say that the city is the only medium worthy of holding an often asymmetrical conversation between writer and reader. Online or in print people can at least, potentially find you and engage. But on the walls there is no such relationship. Who writes on the walls of Bologna? Punk bestie? Students? Graffiti heads? Immigrants? Artists? I've never seen anyone do it, but I've also never seen the walls without writing on them. And neither have friends who've lived here their whole lives. It doesn't matter ultimately. The words are on the walls. They exist, like those behind them.

There's an old man who sells poems under the arches in Via Oberdan. He sits there against the wall smoking roll ups. In the middle of the old stone pavement is a box with tightly wound pieces of white paper offered to whoever wants them. All he asks for in return is a moneta, an acknowledgement that he exists and that you recognize his work. But it's about more than that. What you get for your moneta is a thought you didn't expect but might have needed to remember that you're alive. He might get a coffee out of it. He puts out way more than he asks for. Same with the invisible writers on the walls of the city. The only thing they're asking for are your eyes and a few seconds of your time.

Aside from food, the Bologna of today is also known for its street art. It never was quite as commercially appealing as food tourism, but it has brought its share of people to the city. And those who brought the walls to life with art eventually travelled farther afield. Some turned this passion into a career, garnering enough recognition to attract corporations and other interests. Eventually capital and politics were able to stake a claim to street art, to appropriate something they'd always deemed toxic and noxious, the unstoppable logic of late capitalism - forever capable of repurposing that which challenges it. Unlike street art the writing on the walls though can't be claimed (yet?), they can't be owned, they can't be replicated and sold as a magnet to stick on your fridge. Street artists with a moral center moved on. Those with an itchy pen keep coming back to the walls.

"Vergogna just eat"
“Mi diverto solo se a morire è uno sbirro”
“Noi contro loro”
"Con la Siria del nord #fuckisis"
"Erdogan assassino! La rivoluzione é un fiore che non muore mai!"
"Renzi fuori dall'Italia"
"Smash fascism defend rojava!"

Political news are always on the walls. Who needs a newspaper when you have real time news on the streets?

The week I arrived the walls were full of messages for Erdogan. None of them nice. Most of them invitations to remove the man not just from office but from reality. There were calls for solidarity with the Kurds who had yet again been double crossed by allies more interested in their own interests than in the survival of a people whose historical lands had been taken away from them by centuries of foreign involvement.

A few weeks later and most of the Turkish messages were gone, replaced instead with calls to boycott Just Eat, a food delivery service. "Shame," the walls said. Still, branded Just Eat boxes sat on bikes and on the backs of delivery people criss crossing the city. Like any form of media the walls say what some of us think but they don’t change anything. That requires action.

“Conosci la verita”

Tags and throw ups. Close your eyes and this could be New York City in the 1970s. It’s Bologna in the 2010s though. Hip-hop happened and the world has never looked the same since.

New York City had to be cleaned in order to be sold. Equally, the words on the walls of Bologna are dirt to many, the sign of a sick society where respect has been forgotten. But what could be healthier than the expression of one’s true emotions for all to see or ignore?

There is an egalitarianism built into the practice of graffiti. It is how those without can claim a piece of the infrastructure that encroaches into their lives. In the United States public spaces have been disappeared by corporate interests. In Italy they were fossilized into tourist attractions. You could argue that Italy at least still has public spaces, squares where people can congregate freely. But close attention to those spaces reveals that they aren't as public as we'd like to think, patrolled by police and security, kept clean of anything and anyone that could impact their potential to attract tourism. The writings on the walls tend to disappear the closer you get to Bologna's major tourist attractions or wealthier neighborhoods. They retract. Look around you and you'll find traces of them, you'll see them poking out from nearby alleys and back streets. There's a war going on outside.

“Atorno a me é solo un bidé di lingue sapienti nell' arte di lecare culi”

Via Dell Inferno. Ghetto Ebraico. In this small part of the historic city center the streets are cut in such a way that even Google has given up on trying to replicate them with any exactitude, much less giving you directions for how to walk through them. You gotta do it by yourself, without help. Get lost or die trying.

If you take the correct turns between Via Marzoni and Piazza San Martini there’s a large wooden door, surrounded by a layer of bricks and covered in a beautiful layer of writing. Pink tags at the top, white throw up at the bottom, blue spray in the middle, and hundreds of letters between and around them. It’s best enjoyed at night when tourists aren’t lost around you and the yellow glow of street lights gives the city a cinematic air.

To decipher some of these writings is to learn the hieroglyphs of modernity. The curves of cultures. The prose of reality. All caps. Cursive. English. Italian. Dialetto. Writing in turn confident, innocent, maniacal, decrepit, vicious, proud, sad, angry, pleading. History is layered, today’s open wounds are yesterday’s cauterized cuts. The writing on the door is just as dense. When it comes to throwing up a tag in this city there are no rules, no rites of passages, no respect. Or maybe there are and what we’re looking at is artistic warfare waged in real time. You’d have to ask those with the pens.

"Show me the paletta"

To those unfamiliar with daily life in modern Italian cities, Bologna probably feels a little chaotic at first: whether crossing the street, ordering a coffee, or queuing at the supermarket life here as a certain background intensity that can jar. People shouting and smiling and drinking and smoking and standing in your way as you walk within private spaces given to the public for the benefit of history. There’s method to the madness everywhere you look in Italy. Same goes for the writing on the walls of Bologna. You can walk around and look at the architecture and the centuries of history woven together like a jigsaw of stone and wood. Or you can just walk around and read the walls.

"Se non siete sicuri, non conoscete la realtà"

Laurent Fintoni, Bologna, November 2019.