The Retake graffiti busters

By Megan Williams

ROME — In an attempt by municipal politicians to rid the city of the scribbles, scrawls and phallic symbols that cover many downtown buildings, Mayor Gianni Alemanno’s office has announced a package of tough new measures. Anyone caught spray-painting city walls or selling paint cans to minors will now be fined up to 1000 Euros.  Culprits will also be required to scrub off their paint work within two weeks of spraying it on.
By summer, Romans and tourists alike can expect to rest their eyes upon a few freshly clean travertine façades in the city centre.
But, no, not because of City Hall’s new penalties. Those would require police officers to actually run after — and catch – 15-year-olds on foot.  A scenario that might be fun to watch, but well, is unlikely.
Instead, the city’s exteriors might get a little cleaner thanks to Retake Rome, a resolute group of ex-pat women that’s sounding the clarion call for civic responsibility, all’americana.
Their leader is Rebecca Spitzmiller, a vivacious American law professor who’s lived in Rome for the past 25 years. Since December, Spitzmiller has been scrubbing and scouring the graffiti-covered walls of her neighbourhood church with a group of high-school students.
Why?
“Because I’m fed up, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” she answers, only half-jokingly. “Really, I can’t stand it,” she says. “And this way, at least my own neighbourhood is going to be clean.”
Spitzmiller’s efforts began at home — with four graffiti-covered pillars outside her own condo building. After getting an estimate for a professional cleanup that came in at 10,000 Euros, she decided to try cleaning the pillars herself. She went out and bought oven cleaner, steel brushes, and paint. For a week, she and her teenage son put in a total of 10 hours each, either scrubbing away or painting over the markings. Total cost: 45 Euros.
The results gave her the confidence boost she needed to take the experience out into the community. She corralled a handful of students from one of her classes at the Istituto Cristo Re high school down the street from her home. After giving them a pep talk about civic action, the group began going at the blackened jumble of illegible tags that had covered the church’s outer wall for a decade. After three two-hour sessions over several months, most of the stretch of travertine now glows in the winter sun.
Virginia Vitalone, 18, is part of the group. On a chilly weekday afternoon, she dabs off-white paint that matches the travertine colour over the worst of the black markings.  She says that until Spitzmiller got the group questioning the wide-spread acceptance of graffiti in Rome, she’d seen all the scrawls as merely part of urban life.
“There’s so much in Rome that I just thought that’s the way the city is. But now I know it can be better, cleaner, if we want.”
Ironically, Vitalone says she recognizes some of the tags she’s removed as those of neighbourhood friends. Indeed, the vast majority of graffiti around Rome is tagging — the short-hand signatures of middle- or high-school students literally trying to make a mark.
Her friend Federico Duratore, also 18, scrubs the wall beside her. While dedicated to the graffiti-cleaning cause, he doesn’t appear exactly thrilled about removing other kids’ tags.
“It’s annoying to have to do this,” he says, pushing the brush hard against the travertine wall. “It shouldn’t be up to me to remove the tags. But I want to do it because this is my city. All the buildings should be cleaned.”  
It also irks him when people defend graffiti as public art.
“This is not art,” he insists. “Or it’s the worst way to express art. There are so many different ways for kids to express how they feel, why ruin a building we all have to walk by every day?”
Spitzmiller says passivity cloaked as tolerance means nothing gets done about the tagging. She recounts how passers-by shake their head at her efforts and tell her it’s all futile, that the graffiti will only return in due time. It’s an attitude, she says, that conveys a misguided notion of public maintenance.
“I tell them, ‘Did you brush your teeth this morning? And did you brush them yesterday? And will you again tomorrow?’ Well, living in a city means constant upkeep, too.”
She points across the street to a metre-high marking to make her point.
“I don’t know what it is, maybe a nipple, maybe a nut and bolt. It looks kind of phallic to me,” she says. “But whatever it is, I point out it was here in 1985 when I arrived in Rome, so it’s not as if anyone has been out here trying to maintain the buildings or send out the signal that anyone cares about them.”
Spitzmiller and Retake Rome are now taking their message to Rome high schools. Presentations are partly in English, another way to help widen the perspective and world of Roman kids.
It’s an approach that’s won the approval of Anita Garibaldi, the great-granddaughter of Giuseppe Garbibaldi. The Garibaldi Foundation is lending its name and support to the project, by providing a virtual home on its website.
“Italians clean beautifully inside their homes, but when they step outside, this approach is abandoned completely.” observes Garibaldi, whose mother was American. “The way to put civic sense into minds of Italians is to show us how to do it. I think voluntary groups of the kind Americans are so good at are a very important lesson. This kind of service goes to roots of teaching community feeling.”
Spitzmiller agrees, though she insists she’s not trying to impose foreign values, but instead to pass on the kind of neighbourhood initiative that keeps the world’s top cities liveable. And to implant in Roman kids the concept that urban streets are not a no-man’s land, but rather a shared space that belongs to everybody.
 
– Retake Rome will be holding a Clean-a-thon in Villa Borghese on Saturday, March 14 from 10:30 to 1PM. For more information or to sign up send an email to retakerome@ aim.com