Europe 25: Street Art in Florence

One of the things that is genuinely obvious about Florence is that it is full of art. Everywhere you go there are museums stuffed to the gills with gorgeous works of medieval or Renaissance art, churches filled to the rafters with even more gorgeous works of medieval and Renaissance art, and statues pretty much everywhere. If you like art, you will never want for entertainment in Florence.

But beyond that, there is even more. It lives on the streets and in the alleys and if you’re not paying attention you might just walk right by it without ever noticing. None if it is very old, and most of it isn’t meant to be permanent. It’s just there, out in the open, doing its own thing.

Some of it is actually meant to be official art, though, with a named artist and everything. It just pops up in odd places. When we were walking back from our successful campaign to eat an entire Florentine steak we went by the Basilica di San Lorenzo and it turned out that they were hosting a display of the sculptures of Andrea Roggi. We’d seen some of his work in Matera back in 2023 and really enjoyed it, so we had a lovely time going from sculpture to sculpture there in the darkening night, seeing it silhouetted against the evening sky.

But most of it wasn’t so formal, and you’d find it pretty much anywhere.

This trash can, for example, was just sitting there in Oltrarno, asking the tough questions of passersby.

And this guy was emblazoned on a coffee maker I saw in a shop window. Yes, it’s a corporate logo, but I thought it had a certain style to it.

There are often pointed messages behind the art you’d find in the streets. The ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, for example, provided an ample source of outrage for guerrilla artists in Florence.

But mostly you see things that people just wanted to create, for whatever reason they wanted to create them, and that’s enough for art really. I have no idea what if any larger message these were trying to send, but they were interesting and fun to see.

This guy was painted on the wall of the little canal that we had to cross over to get to the tram stop in the mornings, and it had a certain style to it.

Where you really see Florentines expressing themselves with street art, however, is on the security grates that every shop in the city seems to have – those rolling steel walls that cover the doors and windows after hours so nobody breaks in. Florentine artists seem to regard these as canvases, and I have to say it made the walks through the streets more interesting.

Sometimes you’d get fairly realistic kinds of artwork, though always with a distinct sort of flair to it.

And sometimes the artwork was more abstract or even cartoonish. These tended to have more energy to them.

There was one particular neighborhood, though, that really put the effort into making this art a signature style. When we walked from the Galleria dell’Accademia to meet Stacy and JR for dinner on our last night in Florence we ended up going down Via Palazzuolo, where art adorned pretty much every grate we could see. We stopped to take pictures of it and a woman who lived on that street told us how they were trying to make it a calling card of the neighborhood by having all of the traditional businesses on the street cover their grates with art. She seemed pretty enthusiastic about it, and I have to say it made the street memorable.

Not all of it was painted.

But most of it was. And again, some of it was fairly realistic if somewhat stylized.

While some of it was more abstract or cartoonish.

But all of it was interesting, and it made you stop and look at it to see what was there and why. And that’s what art should do, I think.

My favorite was this one, though, mostly because it used the grate itself to tell its story and that struck me as clever.

Florence is a city of art, and it’s everywhere you look.