Rome to use street art to enhance city outskirts
While doing a great job at NEGLECTING Rome’s streets – potholes, rampant double-parking and an ongoing invasion by THOUSANDS of illegal vendors – the Rome city government is launching a program of “street art” which may, if successful, do something to discourage – or inspire in a more traditional direction – the efforts of Rome’s persistent and vandalous taggers.
Yesterday, the city commissioner for public works, Paolo Masini, announced that the facades of four buildings in the outlying, lower economic San Basilio neighborhood in northeast Rome have been chosen to be part of a project to redecorate neighborhoods with street art. “Rome will be like Berlin, Miami or New York,” Masini said. The city’s outskirt areas are like a great blank canvas,” Masini added.
The choice of the new buildings as a street art sit is part of a massice project that was launched on March 31, when the first work commissioned by the Urban Vanguard Roman Street Art Festival – a geometric-design mural pained across the top of the Rome bus company’s headquarters in the Garbatella district by Clemens Behr, 27, of Koblenz in Germanu – was unveiled. At the time, Masini announced that some 30 international and Italian willbe participating in the project. Spanish street muralist Liqen and Italian street muralist Agostino Iacurci took part in the ‘SanBa’ project in San Basilio. The Festival is supposed to come to an end with two major art shows on city design
