Nearly 4 months after making the trip, I’ve just finished sorting through my myriad pictures of Rome. It may seem odd to start not with famous monuments, classic art or sacred statuary but with something considered vandalism by most every country in the world. However, as Al Burian put it, “Rome is eternal, and I am not – just an inky blot, another infinitesimal blip of light on a schizophrenic map.”
When I was there, taking photos of ‘classic’ Rome seemed not only pointless but downright stupid – these places had and have been and will be drawn and photographed thousands upon thousands of times, with every different variety of camera and hand behind them in every type of weather and light. Me and my trusty Canon Elph point-n-shoot felt very small and useless trying to capture something about these places that hadn’t been captured before. The only things I could think of were to occasionally shove my travel buddy (Mr. Angry Jim) into the frame, since he’d never been to Rome either, or to focus on strange, tiny ephemeral details, like graffiti.
Rome’s graffiti ‘problem’ is modern, with the government recently cracking down hard on tagging and stickering. Rome’s graffiti, however, is ancient. How ancient? THEY INVENTED THE WORD. ‘Graffiti’ (singular, ‘graffito’) meaning ‘tiny scratches’, was used to describe the inscriptions, drawings, names and doodles carved into public monuments, catacombs and buildings around the city. The term was later extended to other forms of public marking, and though not quite the same has occasionally referred to Rome’s ‘talking statues’, points of public bulletin for pasting anonymous critiques of those in power. They even have anti-graffiti-graffiti dating back to Ancient Rome.
Which is to say, most of Rome is so ancient, so suffused with history and grandeur that you, a singular, limited human, are easily overwhelmed and dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of its presence. Graffiti, however, even the ancient stuff, is human-scaled. The personality behind it is there in the style and message. It’s one person speaking across time to another person seeing it, and for the two weeks I spent rushing around the Eternal City feeling rather ephemeral and (especially in tourist-suffused areas) out-of-touch, I was grateful for every word, even the rude ones.
This was my favorite tag; I’m not sure why but a giant scrawled ‘PARDON ME!’ in a public area struck me as hilarious.
Literally translated: “At ease in explosive situation.”
Wheat-pasting for an Italian cowboy comic in the Trastaverde area.
Homer! (said with Italian accento)
In Italian…
…and the English translation.
Really? Weren’t you guys sick of that back in WWII?
Apparently some Romans are also still living the plot of ‘Quadrophenia’.
Right across the street from Piazza di San Pietro.
Not even THAT ancient.
Berlusconi’s face was stickered everywhere, along with wheat-pasted into some very entertaining posters of him with photo-face and cartoon body sweeping bikini babes under a rug. Of course, I neglected to take a photo of that.
