From non-places to festivals
Street art in Italy

Italian street art is rooted in a dense urban landscape of interstitial spaces, including post-industrial architecture, wasteland, abandoned buildings and squats, which, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, led young creators to develop new forms of urban painting. The work was spontaneous and illegal, and mostly derived from the experience of graffiti writing. Over the following decade, and with the proliferation of dedicated festivals, this practice gradually gained recognition from the cultural industry and the art world, which seems to have led to a loss of the spontaneous, dissonant character that originally characterised it.