192 pages Edited By Daniela Luccheti 23 x 14 cm Language: Italian Paperback Publisher: Castelvecchi 2015
The history of those who understood that in the suffocating climate of the large urban agglomeration, having the right to speak means making yourself metropolitan. Lucchetti takes the tag, the piece and aerosol art apart into their components and their history, identifying the phases and the places, the poetics, the tools and the protagonists — and asks what actually drives the expansion: fashion, protest, provocation, or simply the wish to change a city's features, including on other people's property. The route runs from the birth of graffiti in late-1970s New York through its rooting in hip hop and the emergence of figures like Keith Haring, to the streets and neighbourhoods of Naples, Rome, Bologna and Milan. Taki 183, Coco 144, Stay High 149, Lee 163D! and Phase II all appear, as does the mechanics of being crowned king.
Lucchetti is an anthropologist who worked with the chair of Cultural Anthropology in Rome on research projects into youth and metropolitan cultures — and the book reads accordingly: fieldwork rather than picture-book. It arrived in 1999, the same year as Pittura Dura, at the moment Italy started writing its own account of the movement instead of importing the American one. It remains the standard Italian-language reference on the subject, cited in essentially every Italian thesis on writing and street art written since.
