Walking around Bergamo, we often pass the same walls over and over: stone, stucco, concrete, each carrying the palimpsest of tags, scrawls, throw-ups, and the occasional ambitious mural. Most of it we don’t like. Some of it is clever. Much of it feels like a form of urban abrasion. But whether we admire it, tolerate it, or quietly curse it, we can’t not see it.
Graffiti is visual noise. It fills the eye the way unwanted sound fills the ear—insistent, uninvited, and undeniably present. And like noise, graffiti has a way of revealing a city’s and a culture's restlessness.
Noise is a theme we’ve returned to before, in posts as different as our musing on Schopenhauer’s irritation with clatter (Schopenhauer, On Noise), our exploration of disruption across centuries (Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage), and a more personal reflection on how sound becomes a kind of knowing (You Know It When You Hear It). Graffiti simply completes the metaphor. If noise is the soundtrack of a city that refuses to be orderly, graffiti is the handwriting of that refusal.
The Clean Surface Myth
Cities like the idea of cleanliness—clean streets, clean façades, clean narratives about who belongs and who gets to speak. You see this in the small brigade of city workers who occasionally repaint a tagged wall. The smooth, monochrome patch lasts days, maybe hours, until someone adds their mark. The next repaint will come when it comes. Meanwhile, the cycle—paint, tag, paint, tag—becomes its own quiet commentary.
Public space isn’t neutral, no matter how clean it looks. Corporate logos, government messages, shop signage, and advertising already occupy most of what we see. Graffiti just breaks the illusion that these sanctioned voices are the natural state of things. It interrupts, inserts, and insists.
The Easy Explanation We Don’t Fully Buy
There’s a standard explanation for graffiti: it’s the voice of the marginalized, the unsanctioned speech of those without access to the official channels. And yes, sometimes that is true. But walking around Bergamo, this neat narrative never quite matches what’s on the walls.
Most of what we see doesn’t feel like political expression or a plea to be acknowledged. It feels more like a motorbike revving under your window at midnight—an assertion of presence, not a manifesto.
And anyway, if feeling unheard automatically produced graffiti, wouldn’t we all be out tagging? We’re not. When we feel frustrated or overlooked—or simply full of opinions—we take the official routes: voting, emailing the comune, participating in neighborhood committees, or writing blog posts that attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make sense of it all. These are our sanctioned modes of expression. Slow, structured, polite.
No one is spray-painting È vietato ignorare questo blog post on a retaining wall.
So maybe the graffiti–oppression narrative is too tidy. Perhaps graffiti isn’t always a voice from the margins, but a voice that simply refuses to wait. Graffiti collapses time: it speaks now. Civic channels take their time: they speak eventually, after stamps and signatures and agenda items.
The discomfort we feel may not be moral at all—it may be temporal. Graffiti is impatient; we are happy to be patient.
Disorder as Ritual
Graffiti fits neatly into the anthropological idea of ritual inversion—those moments when rules are gleefully broken to reveal how fragile the rules really are. Carnival does this with masks and parody; graffiti does it with paint.
The mess is not a side effect. It is the gesture.
A tagged wall today may be a neat monochrome surface tomorrow, and then a clean canvas again by the end of the week. The city is always smoothing things over; writers are always filling them back up. Impermanence becomes the rhythm.
Texture Over Cleanliness
One idea we keep circling back to is how differently we respond to images of people on walls. We realize we’re more susceptible to graffiti that depicts human forms, especially faces—whether part of a formal mural or something more spontaneous, a piece of graffiti that has drifted into mural territory. The line between the two is often blurry anyway.
So before we get too far, it’s worth admitting that not all wall markings land the same way. Murals—commissioned or not—tend to feel intentional, composed, legible. Faces, in particular, can stop us in our tracks: eyes gazing down, features rendered with surprising tenderness or defiance. These images show up in our photos far more often than scribbles or territorial tagging. They evoke something: recognition, curiosity, maybe even connection.
But are they really different? Or are we just more comfortable with certain forms of visual interruption than others?
Even the most beautiful mural is still an intervention on a wall that wasn’t blank by accident. It claims space just as tagging does. The difference may lie less in the act than in our willingness to decode the result. A portrait offers us an entry point—a face is a language we understand instinctively—while a tag demands fluency in a code we don’t speak.
Perhaps murals and graffiti are not opposing categories but points on the same continuum of urban expression, one simply easier for us to welcome. Beauty can be a softening agent. It can make us forget that the gesture underneath—the insistence on being seen—belongs to the same family as the scribbles we tend to dismiss.
One of the quiet surprises of travel is realizing how much a city’s character comes from the things you didn’t go there to see. London’s layers, Lisbon’s flourishes, and Reykjavík’s bursts of color and whimsy all become part of a place’s mental map.
When we visited Reykjavík years ago, the street art was impossible to ignore—clever, bold, often beautiful, and woven into the city’s fabric. It didn’t feel like vandalism or rebellion; it felt like the city making itself visible in its own energetic way. Not unlike noise, which you never plan for but remember anyway.
Clean walls can make a place feel eerily blank, as if life had been pressed flat. Graffiti—even when messy—adds texture. Yes, some texture is good, right?
What Graffiti May Actually Be Saying
Walking past tagged walls the other day on our way to the hospital, we wondered: what exactly is the message here? Are we meant to decode it? Is there anything to decode? Maybe the message is simply the mark itself—a claim, a moment of visibility, a quick refusal to be quiet.
Or maybe the message is aimed at other writers, not at us at all. The city becomes, in effect, someone else’s chat thread—one we’re reading without fully understanding the references.
Closing Reflection
Graffiti isn’t easy to like, and it’s probably not meant to be. It unsettles the visual field the way noise unsettles silence. But both remind us that cities are not curated exhibits; they are lived-in, contested, slightly unruly things.
Some people speak through walls; we speak through notes, photos, and posts. All of it is a kind of noise—some sprayed, some typed—each insisting on being noticed in its own way.
Maybe what troubles us most is not that graffiti is there, but that we’re not always sure what it’s asking us to notice. And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes a city feel alive.
