Wayward: Fetching Tales from a Year on the Road

florence defaced by graffiti, declared ugly and depressing

In what seems like less than a decade, Firenze’s famous beauty and charm has gone directly into the crapper.

The city has never been particularly effective at fighting miscreant ink but now it’s turned into a real doghouse. The markings are everywhere, even at eye level on the walls around the Duomo. Alleyways and small streets are tagged dozens of times. Many large, wooden doors are blasted with paint. Signs are hardest hit, rendering bus schedules useless at many stops.

It seems like a great time to be a police officer in Florence. There are endless amounts of tourist photos to be taken, plenty of text messages to be written and bottomless espressos to be sipped from tiny paper cups.

Cops in the city center socialize in circles, looking as if they might break out a hacky sack at any moment. Bus and train station rent-a- cops seem to come standard with headphones and MP3 players. They all love to whistle.

Perhaps the police’s apathy makes the Taggers work harder for attention. The words don’t support this theory though. They are banal tags, mostly names and initials. There is no hint of artistic aspiration, like with the murals of Santiago or the clever Banksys that turn up in London. One can only picture 15 year-old nimrods doing what 15 year-old nimrods do - defacing and then running.

The lack of purpose involved in all of this is frustrating and makes the streets look like the set of a bad 1980’s rap video. There’s no “fuck the police” or political statement, no reason given for the defacement of centuries-old buildings. It’s just a bunch of crap spray painted on a wall.

One person seems obsessed with tagging the word “yogurt” as many as ten times in a five-block radius of The Uffizi. Another person has taken to simply dumping buckets of paints on ATM’s.

There is probably much that I don’t know about the war on graffiti here. Perhaps police squads roam the streets at night. Or perhaps a special commission has already been called.  Maybe the mayor isn’t taking three-hour lunches as I imagine in my head, and instead sits in his office, pining over how his city is being devalued. Maybe the tourism commission, who’s Information Points are even tagged up, are not operating with blinders on.

Maybe there’s a master plan in the works to make Florence beautiful again, to make it look less like the inside of a toilet stall. Or maybe we all need just a little bit more yogurt and don’t know it.