Our city has also dedicated a neighborhood to street art, but more about it later.
In the historical center, the first stop for urban art is the one in the Luzzati Gardens, a colorful square enclosed among ancient buildings in the alleys of Genoa which brings together various graffiti realized by national and international artists.
From the Luzzati gardens, along the staircase which takes you to the main comedy theater in the city, you will find a gigantic mural entitled “The Black Sheep”.
To the south of the gardens, one can see instead a big mural depicting the sea which is sometimes difficult to find while walking through the narrow alleys of the historic center that are always quite shady.
There are also quite a few murals at the corner of alleyways and it is not uncommon for Genoese youngsters to use these murals as a meeting point for one of their nights out in the historical center.
Street Art around Genoa
Street Art around Genoa
The most popular murals in the city are those of the Walk the Line project.
A project which started a few years back and consisting of a contemporary urban art path through the creation of a Street Art Tour.
One hundred national and international street artists were selected to decorate the pillars of the Aldo Moro overpass, in order to transform the road that runs along the port, from the Old Port to the Lanterna lighthouse, into an open-air tunnel more than three kilometers long.
Overpass, Walk the Line project
As I previously mentioned, there is an entire neighborhood dedicated to Street Art, and for an important reason.
The Certosa neighborhood, the area hit by the tragedy of the Morandi bridge collapse of 2018, had many buildings demolished because potentially dangerous and at risk of collapsing themselves.
What used to make the Certosa district very special was to be favored by a great location, far enough and close enough to the center, and with a deep sense of community that reigned in its streets.
When the bridge collapsed, the neighborhood was cut off from the city, turning its life upside down, the consequences were economic and social, given the closure of numerous shops and businesses.
Local inhabitants had to leave their homes and were assigned newly built buildings nearby and these latter buildings were painted by commissioned local street artists to ‘give back life’ to these people and this area.
The theme chosen by the curators of the project to the artists was simply joy.
There are no direct references to the bridge or to the tragedy which led to the death of 43 people, because they wanted to propose something new, something alive, something that would live forever.
And the murals here are colorful, joyful, bold.
One mural depicts Canova's ‘Cupid and Psyche’ artwork, a symbol of love, unity and comfort.
Another artwork depicts a famous Genoese comedian, Paolo Villaggio (now deceased), who is ‘looking’ towards the bridge with sadness and skepticism.
A third façade depicts the stylized version of the area’s inhabitants that the artist met and spoke with: a fisherman, a lady with a little dog, a goldsmith, among others.
The most intimate aspect during the creation of this open-air museum is the nature of the relationship that has been created and evolved between the artists and the people who live in the area, between the artists and the houses, the streets and the buildings.
Now the new Renzo Piano bridge replaced the collapsed one and a new overpass was created to make traffic flow better in and out of the city giving Certosa a new chance.
