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This month’s newsletter follows a different structure, as today I simply want to start untangling some fresh impressions from my month in Berlin, researching the upcoming book in the As Seen on the Streets of… series.

I’m stepping away from the usual format and sharing instead some open questions and observations drawn from interviews with Berlin-based street artists and conversations with friends who live here, alongside thousands of kilometres walked through the city following my intuition.

Let’s jump in!

The moment I arrived, I heard it. It was the same sentence I was told 10 years ago, and five years before that, and yes, even on my first visit back in the 2010s. “Berlin is dead, there’s nothing to see here anymore.” Apparently, Berlin has been dead for a very long time.

And yet, we decided to dedicate the fourth volume of our street art book series, As Seen on the Streets of…, to Berlin (the third one is about Lisbon, and it will be out soon-ish, or as soon as we come back from Berlin and finalize the last details).

And so we came here at the beginning of August to dive into the first phase of research, which in practice has meant walking until my feet hurt, interviewing many Berlin-based street artists, photographing walls and updating a colour-coded Google Map that seems to become obsolete almost as quickly as I can organise it. A mural disappears, a former cultural space becomes offices, a place everyone says has been saved turns out to have bought itself only a few more years. Then, just when I think I am beginning to understand the pattern, I find something unexpectedly alive.

Along the way, that sentence kept following me through the many conversations I had: “Berlin is dead.”

I heard it from people who arrived here in different decades, from people who remember the empty spaces after the Wall came down, and from people who still choose to live here every day. I heard it so frequently, not only on this trip but across my many previous trips to Berlin, that I decided to turn it around and ask it directly to the artists I’m interviewing for the book and to friends who live here: “Is Berlin dead?”

Apparently Berlin has developed the unusual ability to die repeatedly without ever quite vacating the premises, and so this past month I stopped wondering whether Berlin was dead and started wondering what, exactly, everyone thought had died.When I started asking the question directly, the chronology became increasingly confusing. WESR, a Peruvian-born artist who has lived in Berlin since 2008, remembers being told almost immediately that Berlin was already dead. When I mentioned this to Various and Gould a few days later, a Berlin-based artist duo whose practice grew out of illegal poster interventions in the streets, one half of the duo laughed: he had heard exactly the same thing when he arrived at the end of the 1990s. At some point we started joking that Berlin had apparently been dying for almost forty years, until he observed that being on the way towards death is, technically, what being alive means.

Pascal Feucher, the French owner of Urban Spree, was much less philosophical about it when we met him at RAW a few days ago. In his version of the story, Berlin’s particularly fertile period for street art lasted until roughly the middle of the 2010s, when international artists were still regularly coming through the city and projects such as Backjumps helped create a scene that felt connected to what was happening elsewhere. He sees what came afterwards as a decline, with Covid delivering the final blow, and when he finished describing the artists who no longer move here and the cultural infrastructure he feels has disappeared, he looked at us and said, almost apologetically, “Sorry if I depressed you guys, but that’s how it is.”

What started to interest me was how confidently people could declare Berlin dead while referring to completely different moments in its history. For someone who arrived in the late 1990s, the lost city might be the one of empty buildings and spaces that could still be appropriated with very little money. Someone else might be mourning the street art scene of fifteen years later, while another person is thinking about rents or the possibility of living here as an artist at all.

Before deciding whether all this was simply Berlin’s unusually persistent form of nostalgia, I needed to understand what had actually disappeared.

What exactly do we lose when a city changes?

During one of my interviews, Damian Yves Rohde (the Berlin-born artist also known as Wand Brand) told me that he cried when the Berlin Wall came down. He was a child and understood very little of the politics surrounding it; what he understood was that the Wall had always been there, a monument he had grown up with and was used to seeing as part of his city. In his words, it was simply “my wall,” and suddenly it was disappearing. I kept thinking about that because it complicates the way we usually talk about urban change: even a transformation celebrated as liberation can contain a very personal sense of loss for someone whose familiar landscape is being dismantled in front of them.

Amigo, a Turkish-born b-boy who was part of Berlin’s early hip-hop scene, remembers the Wall from almost the opposite perspective. When he arrived to Berlin at 10 years old, he could not understand why a city was divided in two in the first place, and even after it fell his parents initially forbade him from going to the other side. Eventually, he and his friends started exploring what had been East Berlin, finding ruins and vast empty spaces that were soon being occupied by parties and independent cultural projects. Those spaces became part of the Berlin that many people I have spoken to still remember as unusually open to experimentation, simply because so much of the city had yet to acquire a fixed purpose.

German artist Jim Avignon, who arrived in the city before the Wall came down and became closely involved with the emerging rave scene, encountered that freedom through those early parties. He told me about painting inside abandoned factories where parties were being organised, sometimes working high up on a wall while people danced below and occasionally looked up to see the image taking shape. The spaces were dark, which is one reason his paintings at the time were largely black and white, and the organisers were simply happy to have someone painting the walls while everything around them was still being invented.

That Berlin is genuinely difficult to recreate today, because the empty buildings and cheap space that made so much spontaneous activity possible have largely disappeared. And yet, walking around the city now, I keep finding their visual language everywhere, sometimes preserved long after the conditions that created it have changed.

Can a city preserve the look of a culture after the culture itself has changed?

One of the things I have kept noticing during this research is how often the visual language of Berlin’s alternative past survives after the function of a place has changed almost completely. At Fabrik23, for example, I found the industrial architecture and traces of old murals I had been hoping for, but the former factory is now largely occupied by private studios and event spaces, and the afternoon we visited there was a corporate mixology class happening in the canteen. Over a more-than-decent Berlin pizza, my friend Zuleika ()’s boyfriend Matteo described places like this as selling the “smell” of the old alternative Berlin rather than its essence, which stayed with me because it captured something I had been struggling to articulate.

Tacheles is perhaps the clearest example. The former occupied cultural centre is now home to Fotografiska, yet some of the painted walls from its previous life have been preserved, including the very first mural by Argentinian-born Berlin-based Caro Pepe. When I interviewed her, she told me that moving to Berlin was also the moment she left a career in marketing to become an artist, which makes that early work feel particularly tied to the kind of possibility the city -and Tacheles itself- once represented. Sara Manfredi, curator of the Italian street art festival CHEAP, put the transformation much more brutally when I met her for a beer one afternoon: “They even sold the corpse.” She meant that instead of clearing the site completely and starting again, the redevelopment kept some of those painted remains and incorporated them into the new cultural complex. The walls that once belonged to an occupied space now help give character to a very different kind of institution, so even the remnants of the old Tacheles continue to produce value. Can you smell “alternative Berlin” yet?

Kera1, a Berlin-born artist whose first studio was inside Tacheles, experienced that place from a very different position. He worked there for years and was still there on the final day, when everyone had to leave the building, although he has never been back since the Fotografiska redevelopment. He remembers it simply as a great period when “so much was going on,” and when he passes the site today he has no doubt that the old spirit is gone.

I had a similar feeling at KulturBrauerei, where , a friend who grew up in Berlin but now lives in Morocco, tried to describe what the former brewery had felt like when it was still a much rougher cultural space, while I stood there looking at its beautifully restored courtyards and trying to imagine the version she remembered. The buildings are still there, and in some cases so are the marks associated with their earlier lives, but the social function around them has shifted.

The most personal example for me was a rooftop in Neukölln that I had loved about ten years ago, when you could drink a beer among street art, pallet furniture and tomato plants. This time I found a €7 entrance fee, Photoautomat booths and pop-alternative props where I remembered the plants.

Holzmarkt gave me a similar feeling. I had expected an informal creative space by the river and instead found something closer to a Christmas market, with rustic-looking signs directing people towards food and shops, while much of the street art was pushed into the background.

What makes this more than a collection of disappointing revisits is the role this aesthetic still plays in Berlin’s city branding. The city continues to benefit from an international image built around creative freedom and a certain roughness, with graffiti and former industrial spaces helping to signal the Berlin people expect to find before they even arrive. That image has enormous cultural and economic value, even as some of the conditions that originally produced it become harder to sustain. And this is where the conversations I have been having with artists start to move the question away from how Berlin looks and towards what it actually means to live and work here as an artist.

How easy is it to be an artist in the city of artists?

The contradiction becomes harder to ignore once the conversation moves from Berlin’s image to the material conditions of being an artist here. When I interviewed Various and Gould, they spoke about cuts to cultural funding and a political climate in which art increasingly feels peripheral. In their view, the Berlin imagined by many politicians today is a city of start-ups and tech, while artists are still too often treated as people indulging a hobby rather than doing a job. When I asked whether culture was at least part of the current election debate, they laughed: barely. One of them then made an observation I have kept thinking about: if art and culture were really so unimportant, authoritarian regimes would hardly spend so much energy trying to control them.

The private market offers little reassurance, as pointed out by German artist Sokar. He described the city as relatively poor compared with places such as London or New York, where there are more collectors and more money circulating around contemporary art. Snyder, a Berlin-born artist with roots in graffiti, gave me an even simpler version of the problem when we were talking about mural commissions: the attitude is often, “I’m already giving you the wall.” The wall itself is treated as compensation, as if the opportunity to paint in Berlin should be enough.

A few days later, WESR explained me why that model can continue to function. Berlin has a constant turnover of young artists who arrive for a few years, build a portfolio and are willing to paint for free because the “Berlin years” themselves become an investment in whatever comes next. When they leave, they can say they painted murals here. For artists who actually stay, pay rent and try to build a sustainable life in the city, that creates a difficult market because there is always someone willing to accept exposure instead of a fee.

Pascal, at Urban Spree, pushed the argument one step further. In his view, young artists are no longer moving to Berlin in the same way because the city has become too expensive, while some young Berliners are leaving for cheaper parts of Germany. He also sees the weakness of the local ecosystem in the lack of specialised galleries and bookshops, especially when he compares Berlin with Paris, where he is originally from and where, he says, that infrastructure is much more developed.

This is where the question of whether Berlin is “dead” starts to feel less like a joke about nostalgia and more like a question about oxygen. A city can continue to benefit from the image of creative freedom for a long time, but that image becomes harder to sustain when the people producing the culture behind it find it increasingly difficult to remain.

The complication, though, is that the people remembering an earlier Berlin have changed too.

Are people mourning Berlin, or their own youth?

The complication is that the people remembering an earlier Berlin have changed almost as much as the city around them. Snyder, who was born here and has never wanted to live anywhere else, was one of the least nostalgic artists I interviewed. Berlin changes, he told me, and it will continue to change regardless of how anyone feels about it. He also pointed out something deceptively obvious: the people who lived through the poor but sexy years twenty years ago are twenty years older now. Some have children, and artists who once experimented without thinking much about money eventually reach a point where their work needs to pay the rent.

Sokar described that shift through his own life. He used to live in Neukölln, until having kids changed the way he experienced one of Berlin’s most alternative neighbourhoods and, more broadly, what he wanted from the city around him. His studio is now in Friedenau, a much calmer and less alternative part of Berlin, and after our interview he insisted on walking us around the area, past elegant houses and an immaculately maintained park that made him joke that it almost felt like England. “When you have children, you start seeing the city differently,” he told me, which felt less like nostalgia for the Berlin he had left behind than an acknowledgement that the city you want can change as your own life does.

Emilia, a Berlin-born friend I spent an afternoon with in Prenzlauer Berg made essentially the same point from another direction. She moved away seven years ago and now returns mostly to see family and friends, and as we walked through beautifully restored streets she kept pointing out buildings and courtyards that reminded her of the Berlin she grew up in. She misses that city, she said, although she is no longer entirely sure how much she misses Berlin itself and how much she misses being younger in Berlin.

This reminded me of a book I read several years ago, La chiave di Berlino by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, who has lived in Berlin for years and whom everyone suddenly seems to have discovered recently. Latronico reflects on how quickly Berlin changed during the same years in which his generation was moving from youth into middle age, and on how difficult it becomes to separate what has genuinely disappeared from what we miss because we experienced it at a particular moment in our own lives.

Innerfields, a Berlin-born artist duo, pushed this idea even further when I asked what they thought of the familiar claim that it is now “too late” for Berlin. “We were too late too. We have always been too late. If you want to be too late, you can always be too late.” For them, even the fall of the Wall created a clear before and after, and there were already clubs and moments they felt they had missed. As they put it, you can always be too late if you remain attached to what came before.

That attitude also feels consistent with their work, which explores the tension between our place within nature and the growing distance from it created by an increasingly mechanised world. Technology is something they question while continuing to experiment with it themselves, rather than treating the past as an automatically preferable alternative.

The useful thing about this perspective is that it does not make the losses imaginary. The empty spaces disappeared, rents rose and the economic conditions that allowed a particular kind of cultural experimentation became harder to reproduce. At the same time, the person remembering a night spent in an abandoned factory at twenty-five may now be looking for a quieter apartment and wondering whether the work they once did for free can finally pay a mortgage. City and biography keep moving together, which makes it surprisingly difficult to determine where nostalgia for one ends and nostalgia for the other begins.

And then there are people whose relationship with Berlin makes that distinction even harder, because the version of the city everyone seems to be mourning was never the reason they came here in the first place.

Which Berlin are we actually mourning?

WESR complicates the nostalgia argument even further because the Berlin many people seem to mourn was never the Berlin he came looking for. He moved here from Peru in 2008 for family reasons, and shortly after arriving someone told him the city was already dead. What makes his story interesting is that he did not arrive with any particular mythology attached to Berlin, and for a long time he did not even like living here very much. Only gradually, especially from around the pandemic onwards, did he begin to appreciate what the city offered him and, as he put it, “make peace with Berlin.”

What he eventually came to value was less the image of abandoned buildings and underground clubs than the freedom of everyday life. He talked about the work-life balance people protect here and, above all, about the feeling that Berlin does not judge you. At one point he told me about seeing what looked like a television moving towards him on the opposite escalator, only to realise that it was a person wearing a TV over their head, dressed in full rockabilly style. His reaction was simply: “Of course. This is Berlin. If not here, where?” He also pointed out that people arriving today may be looking for something completely different from those who came in the 1990s. Someone moving to Berlin now for a job in tech might genuinely love the city as it is, and might have had very little interest in the version others are mourning.

I heard something similar from Gould. The Berlin he encountered when he arrived at the end of the 1990s, with its empty spaces and possibilities for spontaneous cultural use, has obviously changed, yet he told me that he still chooses Berlin every day. The promise that brought him here was the possibility of becoming whoever he wanted to be in a city open-minded enough to allow it, and in his view Berlin still keeps that promise.

Jim Avignon was equally resistant to the idea that the cultural energy everyone remembers has simply vanished. When I asked whether the rave scene he had entered decades ago was dead, he said no. It had changed and become harder, but younger people were still organising illegal parties in parks and finding ways to create things outside formal structures. The scale and conditions are different, yet the impulse that produced so much of the mythology around Berlin has not disappeared entirely.

The more people I spoke to, the less useful it seemed to treat “Berlin” as a single thing that could simply be declared alive or dead. Some people were mourning cheap space, others a particular cultural scene, while others still cared most about a kind of social freedom that they believe survives. The physical city and the promise attached to it seem to be changing at different speeds.

What does a place have to do to still feel alive?

RAW was one of the places I was most curious to revisit because I had liked it on previous trips and several artists had mentioned it when I asked what was still left of Berlin’s alternative scene. It has changed, and of course there are tourists now, but when we went back I was struck by how much of the space was still being used rather than simply treated as a colorful backdrop for photos. People were skating or playing ping pong, while others were drinking, smoking or just hanging around for the afternoon. There was very little of the frantic selfie-taking I had found elsewhere (at the once-legendary Haus Schwarzenberg, for example), and for me that made an important difference. A place can change and attract visitors while still feeling alive, as long as it retains a life that exists independently from the people who arrive to consume its image.

A few days later, however, Pascal at Urban Spree complicated even that relatively optimistic reading. RAW has recently been described online as “saved,” but according to him what has really been secured is the future of Cassiopeia, the well-known club at the centre of the complex, while much of what surrounds it is still expected to disappear and be replaced by offices and apartments. His prediction was also bleakly practical: once people are living next door, a club that depends on loud music late into the night will inevitably face a different set of constraints, so Cassiopeia might technically survive while becoming something very different from the place people fought to save.

That distinction between preserving a place and preserving the conditions that allow it to function kept coming back to me, especially because I had spent much of this trip looking for independent spaces that still felt genuinely DIY rather than designed to reproduce a DIY aesthetic. Many were closed to the public outside sporadic events, and after a while the repeated sense of arriving at a closed door started to affect me more than I expected.

Then, last week, we went to Villa Kuriosum, a place I had found through my own digging rather than through recommendations from artists or friends in Berlin. The moment I walked into the garden, I knew I had finally found what I had been looking for: a DIY space that felt genuinely lived in rather than carefully staged to look alternative, and that somehow managed to feel open at the same time. After weeks of coming across similar places that understandably keep outsiders at a distance, even when that distance still stings a little, the absence of suspicion was almost a relief. There was a concert happening and, when the temperature dropped, someone lit a fire inside a metal barrel; before long, we were sitting around it with everyone else, simply part of the evening.

So, is Berlin dead?

After almost a month of asking the question, what worries me more than whether Berlin is “dead” is the growing distance between the freedom the city still promises and the material conditions required to sustain it. Berlin continues to benefit from its image as a place where artists can experiment and live differently, while many of the people producing that culture describe shrinking support, increasingly expensive space and a market that often expects them to work for exposure.

A few days after that evening, Prizmu, a stencil artist who has lived in Berlin since 2018, gave me another way of thinking about what had happened there. He told me he has little patience for nostalgic conversations about what Berlin used to be, because spending too much time looking backwards, or even forwards, can stop us from paying attention to the city we are actually living in. Standing around that fire, for once, that was exactly what I had done.

Perhaps this is also why his answer felt so close to the way we approach the As Seen on the Streets of… series. Each book includes a chapter reconstructing the city’s street-art history through research and conversations with the artists who lived it, but the rest is deliberately anchored in the present. We photograph what is there now, speak to artists who are active now and try to freeze one particular moment in the life of a scene that will inevitably look different a few years later.

There is already plenty of nostalgia surrounding Berlin; what interests me more is paying close enough attention to the present that one day we will know what was actually here.

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Naples, Madrid, Bristol, and Sardinia, this month we’re landing in Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, for the final stop of the first season of Beyond the Postcards.

More modern, more industrial and far less tourist-facing than Edinburgh, Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city and one of the stops of the UK book tour for As Seen on the Streets of London. I had never been before, although for years I had heard people talk about it with the kind of affection usually reserved for those cities that are not immediately pretty (my kind of cities 😁)

I also had many artist friends living there, so instead of passing through, I decided to spend around ten days in Glasgow, walking through its neighbourhoods, visiting studios, following walls, drinking pints with artists after a day at Yardworks Graffiti Festival, and slowly trying to understand why so many creative people seem to feel at home in Glasgow.

What I found was a city with a rougher rhythm and a very strong sense of itself, alive in a way that felt raw and entirely its own. Glasgow performs charm differently from other cities: through humour and a stubborn creative energy that seems to come straight from the street.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 In this Glasgow mini-guide you will find:

• Glasgow’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Glasgow Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Glasgow Mood.

Glasgow’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods:

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This month’s op-ed looks a little further back than usual, revisiting the night in 2014 when Blu erased two of his most famous murals in Berlin as Kreuzberg was undergoing rapid gentrification, a story I came across again this past month while planning the itineraries for our upcoming Berlin street art trip, when I realised I had never written about it here and decided it was time to make up for that.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,
how are you?

I’m melting in the city heat. This past month, I’ve been glued to my desk, chasing deadlines across the many editorial projects I’m juggling, while also organising my Berlin schedule around meetings with local artists and finalising the itineraries for our summer street art trip. (😁 can’t wait!)

The project I’ve been most focused on is the Lisbon street art book, because this time we took on the only part of the process we had outsourced in the past: graphic design. Paolo is working hard on it, while I chip in every now and then with ideas like this artist index, inspired by a design newsletter I recently discovered called Minor Edits by .

The only time I kept the laptop firmly closed was on my 42nd birthday, which I celebrated with a swim in the lake with Paolo, on what will go down in history as the first, and very likely the last, proper summer day of 2026, followed by dinner with my BFFs at the vegan restaurant in the neighbourhood. It’s simply too hot to go anywhere.

And anyway, I’ve started to appreciate these kinds of low-effort days, or rather, low-performance days, when I don’t need to prove anything to anyone and can simply go about my day with no fuss.

This is definitely one of the consequences of entering my forties. I even remember the first person who told me this would happen: the artist Aida Wilde, with whom I celebrated my 40th birthday during the summer I spent in London researching the London street art book. And wow, is it liberating!

I was thinking about this again the other day when I stumbled upon ’s notes about proudly embracing her “caftan and crystal” era. In my case, it’s more of a “sweats and messy bun” era, with the occasional barefoot day.

Earlier this month, though, I swapped the sweats for something more presentable and headed to Civitanova Marche for the Tabula Rasa Art Market, which gave us another chance to put ourselves out there and talk about our books in person.

Every art book fair teaches us something about how to present the books more clearly, how people respond to them and what we can learn from their questions and feedback. These events are also a chance to meet people developing their own independent creative projects, and seeing what others are making, while discovering so much under-the-radar talent, is always inspiring.

Back home, I unpacked the boxes, changed into something cosy and started applying to several autumn art book fairs in Italy and abroad. Most have already turned us down, but I’ll try a few more open calls this weekend, so keep your fingers crossed. 🤞

I’ll let you know where the books are heading next. In the meantime, you can find our street art book series, As Seen on the Streets of..., online.

Until next month,

Giulia

P.S. Let’s share once again the reader survey! It’s anonymous, it only takes a few minutes to complete, and will help me improve this newsletter:

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✈️ Travel with me!

Last chance to join our Berlin Street Art Trip, this August from 27 to 31!

Expect long walks, plenty of street art, unusual locations and a deeper experience of Berlin beyond its familiar narratives.

By joining this crowdfunding trip, you’ll help make our upcoming Berlin street art book possible and become part of the research behind it. As a heartfelt thank-you, we’ll send you a copy once the book is published! 🥰

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Blu’s Black Walls Against Gentrification

On the night of 11 December 2014, a small group of people began covering two of Berlin’s most recognisable murals with black paint while photos of the operation spread across social media and onlookers tried to figure out why these murals, which had been a part of the city for so long, were suddenly being painted over. At first, many people thought it was the developers who were behind it, since the land the murals were on was scheduled for redevelopment.

But the truth was actually more complex, because the artist, Blu, had had chosen the fate of his murals, turning what initially appeared to be censorship into a deliberate act of self-erasure whose meaning could only be understood through the transformation happening around them.

Blu created the first mural with JR back in 2007, depicting two identical figures from East and West in an image that explored Germany’s reunification and the creative possibilities that had emerged after the division of the city. The next year, he went back and painted the other wall with a man adjusting his tie while two gold watches, linked by a chain, formed a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, creating an image that became increasingly associated with money, power and the constraints of capitalism.

As time passed, the murals grew into landmarks of Kreuzberg and icons of Berlin’s street art scene, showing up in guidebooks and photos taken by tourists until they became part of the same “poor but sexy” image through which the city marketed itself.

Kreuzberg itself embodied that identity, with accessible rents that gave artists room to live and work, while the visibility generated by their creativity gradually recast the neighbourhood as a distinctive cultural destination whose reputation attracted tourism and investment. But the thing is, as property values started to rise, it got harder and harder for the very people who made Kreuzberg so special to actually stay there.

This is one of the central paradoxes of gentrification: the people who make a neighbourhood interesting often help create the appeal that eventually pushes them out, becoming their own worst enemies in the process. The Cuvrystraße murals are a great example of this, since they embodied Kreuzberg’s alternative identity while reinforcing its reputation as a desirable destination, allowing images associated with a critique of capitalism to increase the symbolic value of the neighborhood around them and become a major selling point for the area.

By 2014, this tension had become impossible to ignore, because the vacant plot in front of the murals had been the subject of years of speculative development plans, which put the future of the walls right in the middle of the area's commercial makeover. A campaign soon began calling for the murals to receive heritage protection, and the proposal appeared entirely reasonable to the thousands of people who regarded them as important works connected to Berlin’s recent history, whose preservation might protect a fragment of Kreuzberg’s cultural identity from the redevelopment taking place around it. The murals had become a big part of the area's history, and many people felt that they were worth saving.

Yet from Blu’s point of view, saving the murals wasn’t entirely a good thing, because the new development could keep them even after the community that had given them meaning was gone, turning them into an attractive feature of the new buildings and watering down their rebellious message while offering future residents a carefully preserved piece of alternative Berlin after the people and informal spaces behind that identity had been replaced.

The walls might still look the same, yet those images would operate inside a new economic and social arrangement, lending cultural credibility to the transformation of the place they had once helped define. This is because a mural (and street art, in general) gets its meaning from the wall, street, and neighborhood it's in, and at the same time, it helps shape how people think about that space. So, when the social and economic life around a mural changes, its significance is bound to change too.

Blu took back control of his murals by covering them up, so they wouldn’t get swallowed up by the redevelopment plans. He was basically destroying his own work, but in a way that made a statement, turning the black paint normally associated with the removal of street art into a way of resisting the transformation of the murals into part of the new development.

City authorities usually use buffing to wipe out street art and decide what gets to stay visible in public space, but Blu flipped the whole thing around, using it to defend his artistic freedom and pull his murals out of Kreuzberg’s redevelopment story. In doing so, he brought street art back to its rebellious roots, showing that its spirit was still alive, even in one of Berlin’s most heavily gentrified areas.

The black paint became a new intervention in its own right, preserving the memory of the murals through their absence and turning their disappearance into a final political statement about the transformation of the neighbourhood around them.

In street art, preserving the physical work can also change what it means once the world around it has been transformed, while erasing it can become a way of protecting its political force before the image is absorbed into a different story. Blu chose to make the murals disappear to defend the connection between his work and the place that had shaped it, leaving the black walls to deliver the final message once the transformation of Kreuzberg had altered the meaning of the original images.

I’ve written about the connection between street art and gentrification before, so I’m leaving the link here in case you missed that post:

🔁 Updated!

• Bristol: A Street Art Travel Guide

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👩‍💻 Stuff I write when I’m not here

• UP Magazine - Nuart Aberdeen 2026: Reading Walls in the Age of Images

• Art Mag - WOOL Celebrates 15 Years of Contextual Urban Art in Covilhã

Moreover, I was interviewed by Manolis Andriotakis about pixel street art and by about…life, I guess? 😆

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Naples, Madrid, and Bristol, this month we’re widening the map and setting off on a road trip across the island of Sardinia 🇮🇹

Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean, is known for its beaches, rugged landscapes and ancient history. Yet it also has a rich street art scene that often goes unnoticed by tourists, ranging from politically charged murals to graffiti writing.

Sardinian muralism has no real equivalent elsewhere in Europe. While wall art across much of Italy developed under the influence of New York graffiti and street art, Sardinia’s mural tradition dates back to the 1960s. It emerged as a way to give voice to marginalized communities, placing political and social messages above aesthetics. These murals were conceived as tools for public engagement, often created with the direct involvement of local communities. Across the island, artists addressed institutional repression, military exploitation, industrialization and the erosion of rural life, while also celebrating local figures, traditions and collective memory.

Over time, the movement expanded towards broader themes such as egalitarianism, anti-imperialism, solidarity and pacifism, while preserving its original character as a political and educational practice.

Today, traditional muralism continues alongside contemporary urban art, while Sardinia’s cities also have active graffiti writing scenes.

So let’s set off on a journey through the island’s cities, villages and urban art projects!

🇮🇹 In this Sardinia mini-guide you will find:

• Sardinia’s Best Street Art Cities;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Sardinia Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Sardinia Mood.

Sardinia’s Best Street Art Cities

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This month’s editorial was sparked by a transformation I have been closely involved in: the passage of CVTà Street Fest from a festival format to an artist residency program. More than a change of structure, I see it as a sign of where street art festivals may be heading: beyond the logic of the event, towards slower, deeper, and more responsible ways of working with public space, artists, and local communities.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

how are you?

This month I’m writing to you from Civitacampomarano, the semi-abandoned village in southern Italy where I return every year to manage the social media for CVTà Street Fest, Alice Pasquini’s street art festival.

This year feels particularly special because we opened an art gallery and are transforming the festival into an artist residency. The communication around the project has become much more layered, and I’m finding myself unpacking this shift one layer at a time. The part that fascinates me most is the end of the festival as we knew it and the beginning of a new format that will allow artists to work more deeply, create more meaningful projects, and build a stronger relationship with the place. That’s what this month’s editorial is about (you’ll find it below).

Before CVTà, I spent ten days in Portugal working at WOOL | Covilhã Urban Art, Portugal’s first urban art festival, plus one rather hectic day in Lisbon running around to photograph new works for our upcoming Lisbon street art book. Some of the artists I interviewed have painted new pieces since the research trip when we photographed most of the book, and I really wanted to include them, which meant crossing the city like a spinning top, trying to capture everything in a very limited amount of time.

WOOL and CVTà were two very different experiences, yet they shared something important: the care that goes into creating art in public space. It’s one of the reasons I’ve kept working with both organizations for so many years. At this point, I only want to work with people who care.

That word has been following me around lately. I recently started reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former Director of Public Policy, and I found the title remarkably effective. It captures exactly what I've struggled with over the years, both in some of the workplaces I've been part of and with some of the clients I've encountered as a freelancer: superficiality, disrespect, arrogance, laziness, and that particular kind of carelessness that sees street art, and the artists behind it, as resources to exploit rather than people and practices to respect (and this is why, over time, I keep returning to organizations whose values I genuinely share).

Anyway, this past month I didn’t just return to two events I know well. I also discovered what has already become one of my favorite events: Assedio, a book fair that brings together independent publishers, photographers, artists, researchers, and cultural projects connected to urban and countercultural worlds.

It was our very first book fair as exhibitors, and we absolutely loved it. Over two days we talked about our books, shared the stories behind them, answered countless questions, and realized that many readers are just as interested in the research, fieldwork, and long-term documentation behind our publications as they are in the finished books themselves.

One thing I especially appreciated about Assedio was its atmosphere. Despite the variety of backgrounds and projects represented, there was a real sense of exchange and mutual curiosity. It felt much less like a marketplace and much more like a temporary gathering of people who genuinely care, there it is again, about documenting, preserving, and discussing cultures that mainstream institutions often overlook.

This coming weekend we’ll be heading to another fair, Tabula Rasa Art Market in Civitanova Marche, Italy. I’m curious to see how it compares, and also quite relieved to be attending an urban art event without being involved in the production. Between festival season and the recent heatwave, the past few months have definitely taken a toll on me, both physically and mentally.

Until next month,

Giulia

P.S. It’s that time of the year again! Every June, I run a reader survey to help me improve this newsletter and make sure it continues to be worth your time.

The link is the same as always, it only takes a few minutes to complete, and you can find it here 👇

Take the Survey!

✈️ Travel with me!

The program of our 5-day exploration of Berlin is out!

Explore Berlin with us!

From August 27 to 31, we’ll use street art as a lens to explore the city’s many layers, from residential neighborhoods and former industrial areas to alternative cultural spaces, contemporary architecture and districts undergoing rapid transformation.

Expect long walks, surprising discoveries, unusual locations and plenty of opportunities to experience Berlin beyond its most familiar narratives. This is a journey for curious travelers who want to understand not only the artworks themselves, but also the communities, spaces and stories that surround them.

🐦 Early bird registration until July 5th!

🎥 New on Youtube!

In this video, you’ll see WOOL | Covilhã Urban Art Festival from the inside: artists painting, murals taking shape, the production team at work, and the slightly chaotic rhythm of following everything across the streets of Covilhã, Portugal, with a camera in hand.

✍️ New on the blog!

WOOL 2026: Why Portugal’s Oldest Urban Art Festival Still Feels Different

This year's edition carried particular significance, celebrating fifteen years of WOOL | Covilhã Urban Art. It was not simply an anniversary, but proof that an independent festival can grow without losing the values that made it meaningful in the first place. Context, community, curiosity, and the belief that public space can still be a place for dialogue remain at the centre of this festival, shaping an edition that once again invited artists to spend time understanding Covilhã before leaving their mark on it.

Read it on the blog!

Best Street Art Book to Inspire Your Summer Travels

Summer is around the corner, and whether you’ve already booked your trip or are still wondering where to go next, let me ask you something: what if you planned it with a book instead of an algorithm?

Read it on the blog!

Is This The Future of Street Art Festivals?

After ten years of CVTà Street Fest, this year we changed rhythm. We felt that the festival had accomplished what it was born to do: it had welcomed artists and visitors to Civitacampomarano, a village marked by depopulation, filled its empty streets with people, and transformed a place far from the usual cultural maps into one of Europe’s most unexpected street art destinations.

Precisely because of this, continuing in the same way no longer felt like the most honest choice. From this year on, CVTà will grow as an artist residency program, hosting one artist at a time and allowing each project to unfold through research, stories, daily encounters, and a slower relationship with the place and the people who inhabit it.

I believe, and honestly hope, that many street art festivals will move in a similar direction in the coming years, because the opposite drift is becoming impossible to ignore: a growing culture of Instagram-driven muralism that is producing more images in the streets, with less and less meaning attached to them.

Can street art still be meaningful if we keep producing it at the speed of events?

The problem is not the festival format itself. Festivals can still create powerful moments of encounter, discussion, fun, and shared attention around street art. The problem begins when the format becomes a machine that has to produce at high speed: artists invited for a few days, walls assigned in advance, images created to be photographed from the right angle, made to exist through the endless cycle of online visibility.

Even the act of choosing the wall can disappear from the process. Yet looking for the right location, reading the street, and understanding how an image might live in relation to its surroundings have always been core elements of street art, as we explored in last month’s newsletter.

In this system, research, hesitation, listening, and context are often the first things to disappear, as the mural is conceived elsewhere and only occasionally adapted to fit a wall or a local reference. The result can still be beautiful, technically impressive, and visually effective. It works perfectly online, where context is collapsed. Yet it remains detached from the place where it appears. It could have been painted in another city, or even another country, without its meaning changing in any substantial way. Within this economy, this absence of roots is no longer perceived as a problem, because the work is primarily expected to circulate on Instagram. For me, the problem is twofold: street art becomes portable content, while public space is reduced to a surface, much like advertising billboards do.

I noticed this again earlier this month while working at WOOL in Covilhã, Portugal, a festival that is not an artist residency, although its approach often feels much closer to that of a residency than to the production rhythm of many urban art festivals. Artists are not invited simply to bring an image to Covilhã; they are invited to spend time in the city and let the work take shape from what they encounter there.

This is why I think the real question is not whether a project takes the form of a festival or a residency, but whether it gives artists enough time, space, and trust to create work that is genuinely contextual. At CVTà, we chose to make that space by becoming a residency; other festivals may find different forms, but the direction, to me, should be the same: less pressure to produce quick, easy-to-like images, and more room for artists to understand the places they are working with and create something meaningful in that specific context.

Can fewer walls create more meaning?

Maybe this is where many street art festivals are now being asked to mature: by questioning the idea that their value depends on producing more walls, getting more likes, or attracting more visitors. Slowing down is not stepping back; this was the conviction behind our decision at CVTà. It can be a way of investing more attention and always-scarce resources in fewer projects, of allowing artists to move beyond the ready-made image and return to the practices that should be at the centre of street art: research, sketches, studies, conversations, observation, doubt, friction, and the possibility of changing direction.

One more thing I noticed this past weekend in Civitacampomarano is that the artists who returned to celebrate this shift towards residency with us very naturally embraced the idea of creating something spontaneously in the village. They looked for their own locations, followed what caught their eye, and painted intimate works on a human scale, born where the arm can reach, at most with the help of a ladder.

I have been advocating for human-scale street art for a while now, and I feel this should probably become the topic of another newsletter. This time, though, I wanted to stay with the feeling I had after this month between WOOL and CVTà: that other directions are possible, and that they are already being tested by people who care enough to change the conditions of production rather than keep feeding the same cycle.

After so many editorials spent discussing what is going wrong, I felt I owed you some hopeful thoughts too. I do feel positive after this past month. Tired, very much so, but also convinced that the conversation does not have to remain trapped in criticism. There are festivals already working with more attention (with more care!), where artworks are allowed to grow out of a real encounter, and there are artists who want time to look, listen, sketch, and change direction.

And yes, a residency might not be a perfect solution, and not every festival needs to become one, but residencies do make one thing clear: depth needs a real relationship with the place.

If the future of street art festivals is not simply to grow through Instagram visibility, then perhaps the most urgent question is not how many images they can send into circulation, but whether the works they produce can still belong to the places where they appear.

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Summer is around the corner, and whether you’ve already booked your trip or are still wondering where to go next, let me ask you something: what if you planned it with a book instead of an algorithm?

At a time when TikTok and Instagram keep sending us to the same cafés, viewpoints, and “must-see” spots, I still believe in the power of a good book. Especially a book that has been walked, researched, photographed, written, and carefully put together by someone who knows how to read a city through the signs left on its walls, and invites you to do the same.

Every city has a version designed for visitors, and another shaped by the people who actually live there. That second one is usually more fragmented, contradictory, and emotionally richer.

Street art and graffiti often pull you away from the staged version of a city and closer to that deeper layer. They interrupt polished narratives, break the illusion of the perfect postcard, and remind you that a city is first of all a place where people live, argue, protest, leave traces, and make space for themselves.

This is why looking for walls when you travel can lead you to some of the most interesting urban spaces, including places that were never designed to be interesting in the first place: vacant lots, railway underpasses, abandoned buildings, neglected parks, neighbourhoods in transition, and contested corners where different visions of the city collide.

These places became meaningful because people found ways to use them long before anyone thought of preserving, promoting, or branding them.

And this is why, when graffiti and street art books focus on a specific city, they become an alternative kind of guidebook. They lead you away from the usual landmarks and into neighbourhoods where the city feels more layered, more local, and often more honest. They help you notice walls, side streets, shutters, old signs, temporary marks, and stories that rarely make it into conventional travel guides. Most importantly, they give you a reason to walk differently.

This is also the kind of travel I explore every month in Beyond the Postcards, the travel side of Beyond the Walls, my long-running newsletter on street art, graffiti, off-the-beaten-path travel, and a bit of my life in between.

In these alternative travel guides, I share personal routes, local tips, cultural context, and unexpected ways to explore a city through its walls. Recommending street art books dedicated to that city is one of the many ways I suggest new paths and more original explorations.

Those guides are entirely supported by readers (thank you!), and reserved for paid subscribers. For this post, freely available to everyone, I decided to gather some of those reading recommendations in one place -partly because summer is coming, and I want to help you prepare for your travels with books that can genuinely change the way you move through a city, partly because I want to support fellow street art book writers, independent publishers, and the people who keep this culture alive on paper. ( It’s a matter of karma, after all!)

So here they are: my street art book recommendations for your summer travels, divided by city.

Street Art Books to Inspire Your Next City Trip

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Amsterdam:

• When Keith Haring came to Amsterdam in spring 1986 for his first solo show at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, he did more than exhibit his work. He moved through the city, met teenage graffiti writers and connected easily with the local scene. The book “The Dutch Adventures of Keith Haring. Amsterdam Notes” revisits that moment, including the backlash from critics and squatters who dismissed his work as opportunistic, often ignoring his engagement with gay culture, AIDS, Apartheid and environmental issues.

• Yaki’s Scrapbook is a time capsule of early graffiti history, reproducing a 1983 scrapbook compiled by Tanya Trijbels, then wife of Amsterdam gallerist Yaki Kornblit. She preserved press articles, photographs and materials from the exhibitions he organized with artists such as Futura 2000, Blade and Dondi.In the early 1980s, Kornblit was the first art dealer to give New York graffiti writers solo shows in a formal gallery setting, at a time when graffiti, created largely by teenagers of color from marginalized neighborhoods, was dismissed as vandalism.

• Tunnel Vision offers a meticulous, full-scale photographic reproduction of Amsterdam’s Oostlijn metro tunnel, transforming a four-kilometer underground stretch into a 12.5-meter-long visual archive on paper. Beyond documenting four decades of graffiti, the book traces the intertwined history of Amsterdam’s urban development and its subcultural expressions, revealing how infrastructure and illicit art evolved side by side.

• White Phosphorus is a collection of poems by Amsterdam’s street poet Laser 3.14.

• Shoe’s Black Book: Graffiti in the 1980s offers a window into an artist’s formative years. Before the galleries, the recognition, his development as a typographer and founding the Calligraffiti art movement, there was this: a worn and relentless black book filled with tags, pieces and outlines.

• Memorabilia: A Scan Through Dutch Rave Culture assembles 432 original flyers into a dense visual archive of Dutch rave culture, bridging private collections and institutions such as Paradiso and RoXY. The book functions as a collective time capsule, tracing two decades of nightlife history from the rise of gabber to the consolidation of labels like Rush Hour and Clone Records.

• Amsterdam Bike Crates is a photobook documenting a frequent target for writers (and my personal obsession).

More alternative tips to plan your Amsterdam trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Athens:

• “The history of graffiti in Greece 1984 – 1994” by Charitonas Tsamantakis (research), edited by Orestis Pangalos, Futura Publications (Athens, 2016). A remarkable bilingual (Greek and English) volume that offers a unique window into the origins and early development of Greek graffiti culture. It’s packed with rare photos (many from the 1980s) featuring breakdance crews, NYC-inspired sketches, backpieces, and early graffiti pieces by Greek writers, in Athens and beyond.

More alternative tips to plan your Athens trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Barcelona:

• Polyrhythmic Beats, the monograph of local street art legend Kenor, written by Rafael Schacter.

• Besi, Tres Xemeneies, Barcelona explores Barcelona’s hidden and abandoned spaces through the lens of urban explorer Bennett Encke. Structured in four chapters, the book documents underground infrastructures and overlooked sites tied to the city’s modern urban planning.

• This photobook by BCN KILLS showing spontaneous street moments in Barcelona.

• Ara Comença l’Scooter Run. Scooterisme a Catalunya 2009-2019 by Hector Vilar is the first book documenting the scooterist/skin/rudeboy scene in Barcelona and Catalonia.

• This collection of flyers and posters of hip hop jams in Barcelona from 1990 to 2000.

More alternative tips to plan your Barcelona trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Bristol:

• If you’d like to dive deeper into Bristol’s street art history, my first recommendation is Vanguard: Bristol Street Art: The Evolution of a Global Movement, the catalogue of the award-winning exhibition held at M-Shed in 2021. Presented as a collection of essays, it offers the first major overview of Bristol street art, tracing its evolution from the early 1980s to the present day.

• If you read Italian, my friend Andrea Lucarini has recently published A Bristol con Banksy, a compact introduction to the city. Street art, trip hop, activism, independent culture: all the elements that make Bristol such a unique place come together in its pages.

• Another excellent read is Massive Attack: Out of the Comfort Zone by Melissa Chemam. More than a biography of the band, the book explores the multicultural roots of Bristol through reggae, punk, sound system culture and activism, showing how the environment that shaped Massive Attack also helped shape one of the most influential underground scenes in Europe.

Here’s a short selection focusing on excellent books on Banksy:

• Banksy Captured Vol. 1 by Steve Lazarides (2019)

• Banksy Captured Vol 2 by Steve Lazarides (2020)

• Banksy by Andipa Gallery (2009)

• Banksy: Building Castles in the Sky by Stefano Antonelli (2021)

• You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat by Gary Shove (2019)

• Banksy: Completed by Carol Diehl (2021)

More alternative tips to plan your Bristol trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about London:

• The one, the only, the unapologetically brilliant, hopelessly over-researched, and slightly biased best book on London: As Seen on the Streets of London, by yours truly

• The Future Language of the Ikonoklast is not just about London, but a history of UK graffiti curated by one of its key figures, Remi Rough (also featured in our book).

• As Dotmaster also recalls in my book on London’s street art, The Dragon Bar was the place where all the street artists would gather, one of the defining underground hotspots of the scene. The book The Dragon Bar 1998–20081 pays tribute to this long-gone but not forgotten venue, featuring interviews with Banksy, Faile, INVADER, Mode 2, EINE, Sweet Toof, and many others.

• If you are fascinated by London Punks you should get the book Punk London 1977: the Roxy, the Vortex, Kings Road, and beyond by photographer Derek Ridgers.

More alternative tips to plan your London trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Madrid:

• Written by Madrid graffiti expert Javier Abarca, Guía del arte urbano de Madrid retraces the history of graffiti and street art in the city. (this book is only available in Spanish).

• The catalogue of MAST, the first graffiti exhibition in Spain, which took place in Madrid back in 1991;

• Rockocò, a legendary series of self-published fanzines from the 1980s (#8 features some of the earliest photos of graffiti in Madrid);

• Getting Up: Madrid Graffiti Autoctono traces the origins of Madrid’s native graffiti scene, from Muelle to later generations, through rare photos and drawings;

• Madrid Cierres is a comprehensive survey of Madrid’s shutter graffiti scene, combining visual documentation with firsthand voices of writers and artists united by a shared drive to occupy the city;

• Punk Graffiti Archive: Madrid documents the little-known “flechero” graffiti scene that spread across Madrid in the 1980s, before the influence of New York-style graffiti. Through unpublished images and archival material, it captures a local, punk-rooted form of tagging that developed independently, then disappeared as global graffiti culture took over.

More alternative tips to plan your Madrid trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Naples:

• Napoli Punx – 1979 – 1983 documents Naples’ early hardcore punk scene through fanzines, photos, and the archive of Davide Morgera.It captures a generation driven by urgency, anger, and DIY culture, where music was less a form than a need to exist and resist.

• Dispacci #1: Malati is a photographic newspaper by Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli capturing Naples in the days leading to S.C.C. Napoli’s title win.Through fast, chaotic images, it portrays a city suspended in collective euphoria, where football, identity, and myth collapse into one shared, feverish moment.

More alternative tips to plan your Naples trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Paris:

• The one, the only, the unapologetically brilliant, hopelessly over-researched, and slightly biased best book on Paris: As Seen on the Streets of Paris, by yours truly:

• Paris sous Paris: La Ville Interdite by Gilles Thomas & Gaspard Duval, a collection of photos and stories from the forbidden catacombs in Paris.

• Psyckoze – Intime Errance Cataphile collects a series of photos by graffiti writer and cataphile Psyckoze.

Here’s a short selection focusing on monographs of legendary street artists who have shaped the streets of Paris:

• Miss Tic – Flashback: 30 ans de création

• Jef Aérosol – Parcours fléché

• JR – 28 Millimeters

• Ernest Pignon Ernest by André Velter

• Invader – Part III

More alternative tips to plan your Paris trip:

Graffiti and Street Art Books about Rome:

• Much of the golden era of Roman graffiti is captured in the book Rome Subway Art by Mathieu Romeo;

• while the early days of Rome’s street art scene are well represented in the book Roma Omnia Vincit by two old pioneers of the movement, Diamond and JB Rock.

More alternative tips to plan your Rome trip:

That’s it for now!

My aim with this list was simple: to help you find the right street art book to slip into your suitcase, read before leaving, or use as inspiration for seeing your next destination from a different angle.

Let me know if I’ve succeeded. I’d love to hear which titles you’ll end up buying, and where you’re heading this summer! 🏝️

See you in your inbox on July 1st with the next edition of Beyond the Walls,

Giulia

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can buy any book via this Le Grand Jeu link, Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Naples, and Madrid, this month we land in Bristol 🇬🇧, the city that stole my heart.

Bristol has always done things differently. Culture here has never been confined to museums and galleries, and some of the city’s most influential countercultures have travelled far beyond its borders.

I first lived in the city in 2016. This spring, while touring the UK with my latest street art book As Seen on the Streets of London, I returned for almost three weeks. A lot had changed in the meantime, but the first thing that struck me was how many artworks had survived the passing of time.

And I don’t mean only the usual canon of protected murals or the old Banksy pieces preserved behind plexiglass like urban relics. What surprised me even more was seeing political murals, illegal works and unsanctioned pieces still standing exactly where I remembered them, sometimes fifteen years after they first appeared on the walls.

In Bristol, the relationship between street art and permanence seems to work differently. It goes beyond the familiar dynamic where large commissioned murals are preserved while anything painted illegally disappears within days. Here, many unsanctioned works have been adopted by local residents and quietly taken care of over the years.

Across the city, these older layers remain, sustained not by festivals, tourism or branding strategies, but by the simple fact that people care about them.

To me, that says a lot about Bristol. Street art here feels embedded in everyday life rather than treated as a cultural product or a tourist asset. Everybody seems to have an opinion on it, from school kids to elderly residents, and that creates a sense of collective responsibility around the city’s walls.

It’s something I rarely witnessed elsewhere, especially in larger cities where people tend to move through urban space absorbed in their own routines. But in Bristol, there is still a strong sense of participation in local culture, politics and neighborhood life. Maybe that’s what still makes the city feel so special to me after all these years. 🥰

So let’s trace Bristol’s many layers together, through the murals, stories and neighborhoods that continue to shape the city today.

🇬🇧 In this Bristol mini-guide you will find:

• Bristol’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Bristol Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Bristol Mood.

Bristol’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods:

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This month’s editorial grows directly out of a panel I moderated at the Yardworks Festival in Glasgow, focused on legality, artistic freedom, and the contradictions surrounding legal walls within graffiti and street art culture.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

How are you?

I’ve just returned from the UK book tour, which saw me bringing our independent, self-published street art book As Seen on the Streets of London to four different cities over six weeks, although at some point it genuinely felt like it would never end. 😅

I want these monthly check-ins to stay honest, a real behind the scenes of what my work and my life often look like.

And honestly, this past month left me more frustrated than inspired.

I had projected a lot of hope onto this tour, not only financially but emotionally too, because I thought the festivals hosting the talks and launches would help create momentum around the book, help new people discover it, and give a little more visibility to a project that has been built entirely independently over the course of two years. Instead, most of the time, it felt like pouring an enormous amount of energy into something while barely seeing it move.

After weeks on the road, I came home having sold far fewer books than I had hoped for, and I found myself struggling with a feeling that I imagine many independent creatives know very well: the exhaustion of constantly giving your all to projects you deeply believe in while trying not to let the lack of tangible results slowly erode your motivation.

At the same time, I don’t want this reflection to erase the genuinely beautiful moments this tour also gave me, because meeting readers in real life, beyond the screens, remains one of the most rewarding parts of all this, and some of the most meaningful moments of this past month came precisely from those encounters after talks, or around street art festivals.

I also got to reconnect with artists, photographers, writers, organizers, and friends scattered across this chaotic family that the street art scene somehow becomes over time, spread between cities, festivals, temporary reunions, and people constantly crossing paths again in unexpected places.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I immediately bounced back from it all full of fresh energy, especially because the moment one tour ends, many other projects are already waiting, and I’m now supposed to dive straight into the Lisbon book and the next phase of this ongoing series while still trying to shake off a little of the disappointment left by this past month. 😓

So, back R(h)ome, it is indeed time to fully return to the Lisbon book, which is still very far from being finished, and which currently occupies most of my days between (still!!! 😩) chasing artists across different countries to get image release forms signed, working on the collage for the paperback cover, editing texts, and trying to bring some order to a project that, despite months of intense work behind it already, still feels very much stuck in that chaotic middle stage where the finish line remains difficult to even visualize.

At the same time, life outside our “As Seen on the Streets of…” book series somehow kept accelerating too, although this is simply what happens during peak festival season, when emails, projects, invitations, deadlines, and cities all begin collapsing into one another.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running the communication for CVTà Street Fest, which this year is growing into something much bigger and more ambitious than before, as we are not only launching a book and opening an art gallery, but also transforming the festival into a more permanent art residency program. I’ll share more thoughts about what this shift actually means in next month’s newsletter, because it says a lot about how I see the future of street art festivals evolving, but if you are joining the big opening party where Massive Attack’s Daddy G will be playing, meet me at the front left speaker on June 27th. 😏

In between all this, I’ve also been writing about Nuart Festival for a couple of art publications (links at the bottom of this newsletter), speaking at Rome’s American University about over-tourism and the ways cities might respond to it and, because apparently none of this was enough already, we are now also preparing for a couple of urban art book fairs in Italy (Assedio in Modena and Tabula Rasa in Civitanova Marche), which means the house is currently a chaos of book stocks, packaging materials, tablecloths, paper bags, and more bits and bobs. 😅

Until next month,

Giulia

ps. I somehow forgot to mention that I’m also heading back to WOOL, Portugal’s first urban art festival, which is turning 15 this year. More details on the festival program below.

See you on the road!

✈️ Travel with me!

You love hunting for street art in the farthest corners of a city, but every trip turns into a negotiation with someone who's already tired after the second mural?

With us, things work differently.

Join us in Berlin, from August 27 to 31

The trip is part of the research for the upcoming Berlin book. I’ll guide you through the city, while Paolo photographs it for the next volume of the As Seen on the Streets of… series. By joining this crowdfunding trip, you become part of the process and will receive a copy of the book once it’s published.

📤 Reply to this email if you’d like to join!

This month’s editorial grows directly out of a panel I recently moderated at the Yardworks Festival in Glasgow, focused on legality, artistic freedom, and the contradictions surrounding legal walls within graffiti and street art culture.

I have published the full panel transcript on the blog for those who want to read the complete conversation, while here I continue to unpack the ideas, tensions, and provocations that remained unresolved during the discussion, for lack of time.

The Problem with Legal Walls.

What happens when a culture born from direct, unauthorized interaction with the city becomes a curated cultural infrastructure?

While preparing for the panel, I knew that this was the question I actually cared about the most. Yet, like often happens during public discussions, we never fully arrived there. We spoke about legal walls, mural festivals, artistic freedom, institutional compromises, and creative autonomy, but the deeper contradiction remained mostly beneath the surface.

Because the real question is not whether legal walls are “good” or “bad,” but what happens when a cultural practice born from a spontaneous and direct negotiation with urban space slowly transforms into an organized cultural infrastructure made of permits, sponsors, public funding, and municipal approvals.

The paradox is that, while mural festivals are often presented as a celebration of street art culture, the more institutionalized and production-heavy they become, the more selective they inevitably are, ultimately contradicting the openness and accessibility that once stood at the core of the street art movement.

The more resources a festival needs in order to exist, the more stakeholders become involved in deciding who gets to paint, what kind of work is acceptable, and what kind of aesthetics are considered valuable.

Moreover, the obsession with monumentality has not only transformed the visual language of street art, but also narrowed the psychological perception of who belongs in that space.

Today, many people no longer imagine themselves painting a wall unless they possess extraordinary technical skills, a polished portfolio, institutional legitimacy, or access to festival networks, even though graffiti and street art were originally born precisely as direct and accessible forms of interaction with the city, practices that existed outside institutional frameworks rather than being filtered through them.

At the same time, however, I don’t want to romanticize illegality entirely, because the risks embedded within the practice have historically excluded many people as well. The possibility of arrest, fines, or police violence inevitably affects people differently, often discouraging those who are already more vulnerable or marginalized, including people of colour, while the necessity of moving through the city at night, frequently in isolated spaces, has also kept many women away from certain forms of graffiti and unsanctioned street art altogether.

Legal walls and mural festivals have undeniably opened the field to artists who may never have entered the culture otherwise, and this is something that should absolutely be acknowledged. The problem begins when the desire to make street art more publicly acceptable also starts flattening its visual language and its complexity.

One of the most revealing moments during the panel came when Izzie Hoskins spoke about the public backlash received after replacing a figurative mural portraying Jimi Hendrix with a much more abstract intervention by graffiti writers Taps and Moses, when many people suddenly felt compelled to complain after being confronted with a work they could not immediately decode aesthetically.

This is exactly the same dynamic I witnessed in Rotterdam during the All Caps Festival, when Eneri painted a large-scale pixação piece on a prominent wall, triggering intense public reactions and debates around what is considered acceptable or even recognizable as art within the public sphere. Ironically, the curator of that festival, Daniel Claessens, was sitting on the panel in Glasgow, but unfortunately we did not have enough time to fully unpack that topic, despite it touching the core of the entire discussion. I actually wrote about this episode in a previous newsletter because I believe it says a lot about the current state of street art culture.

What these reactions reveal is that the public often embraces street art only as long as it remains visually reassuring, decorative, and Instagrammable. Murals are celebrated when they beautify and/or provide instantly recognizable cultural references, but the moment an artwork becomes coded, politically uncomfortable, or simply difficult to interpret, its legitimacy is questioned again.

In many ways, institutions have helped normalize street art aesthetically without necessarily embracing its deeper cultural logic. The public has learned to appreciate murals, but not always how to read them critically. This is also why I increasingly believe that education should become a much more central part of festivals and public art programs, not in the sense of making the work more accessible by simplifying it, but rather by giving audiences the tools to engage with complexity, ambiguity, subcultural references, and forms of visual expression that do not immediately explain themselves.

Most of the work I do actually revolves around this exact process: accompanying audiences, residents, and local communities beyond the disneyfication of street art, helping create a wider understanding of why certain works matter even when they are uncomfortable or anti-decorative. Because if public art only becomes acceptable when it behaves politely, reassures viewers, and fits neatly within the visual language of urban branding, then we are no longer talking about a culture capable of challenging public space, but simply about another form of city marketing.

More broadly, I believe the problem is not that street art has entered institutions, municipalities, museums, or cultural programming. After more than fifty years, it would be unrealistic, and honestly reductive, to imagine graffiti and street art remaining frozen in a purely underground dimension forever. The problem begins when the culture is expected to reshape itself entirely around the conservative logic of institutions, instead of institutions evolving enough to support a form of expression that is, by nature, contradictory, rebel, territorial, and at times uncomfortable.

What is increasingly being regulated today is not just where people can paint, but also what kind of imagination is allowed to exist publicly, which aesthetics are tolerated, which messages are fundable, which visual languages are easy enough to transform into branding strategies for cities competing for tourism, investment, and cultural capital.

This is why I think festivals should become adventurous again (to bring the “street” back into “street art festivals,” quoting the Estonian festival Stencibility, and to start “uncurating,” quoting Nuart founder Martyn Reed), to be more willing to leave room for uncertainty, experimentation, and genuine interaction with the city, to support the disorganized rhythms of the street rather than neutralizing them entirely, to challenge municipal rigidity instead of simply adapting to it, and to create conditions where artists can still surprise themselves, improvise, react, or leave something unresolved. What matters now is finding ways to preserve the friction, unpredictability, and freedom that made street art culturally necessary in the first place.

P.S. None of this means rejecting festivals, legal walls, or institutional support. Some of the most meaningful projects happening today exist precisely because artists, curators, and municipalities are trying to build new models together. But if street art completely loses its ability to provoke and exist outside controlled cultural frameworks, then something essential disappears with it. Because perhaps the real danger is not that street art becomes institutionalized, but that it becomes entirely predictable.

✍️ New on the Blog!

WOOL 2026: The Urban Art Festival That Grew With Covilhã.

From June 11 to 21, WOOL Festival returns to Covilhã to celebrate 15 years of urban art, community, and public space in Portugal’s former textile city. More than a mural festival, WOOL has become one of Europe’s most thoughtful and community-driven urban art events, bringing artists from around the world into dialogue with the city and its residents.

Read the Program on the blog!

😎 See you there!

👩‍💻 Stuff I write when I’m not here:

• ArtMag - Nuart Aberdeen 2026 Opens with Robert Montgomery’s Illuminated Poem Inside Bon Accord Baths.

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Naples, this month we land in Madrid 🇪🇸, the city I once called home.

From the tags of Muelle and the local movement of flecheros who began marking the streets of Madrid in the 1980s, the city has evolved alongside the art on its walls, gradually becoming one of Europe’s most important capitals for urban art. Less polished and less tourist oriented than Barcelona, Madrid still preserves neighbourhoods where street art feels raw, spontaneous and deeply connected to everyday life. Pair that with one of the liveliest contemporary art scenes in Europe, thriving inside former factories, railway workshops and unconventional cultural spaces, and the result is one of the most exciting cities on the continent for anyone interested in urban creativity.

I lived in Madrid in the early 2000s, when the street art scene was just beginning to flourish and the city felt very different from today. Since then I have kept returning regularly (once even together with readers of this newsletter 🥰), watching the city change without entirely losing its character, something that cannot easily be said about many European capitals. What still strikes me is how healthy and restless the artistic scene remains: galleries continue opening in basements on the outskirts, artists still work illegally in the streets, and museums and independent spaces keep pushing beyond the mainstream rather than simply trying to please it.

So, let’s wander through the streets of Madrid together.

Vámonos.

🇪🇸 In this Madrid mini-guide you will find:

• Madrid’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Madrid Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Madrid Mood.

Madrid’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods:

Read more

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This month’s editorial looks at text-based street art, and how bringing language into the streets reshapes our relationship with public space.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

how are you?

This month I’m writing to you from Glasgow, where I’ve just arrived, somewhere in the middle of the UK book tour. It’s my first time here, and although I’m feeling the weight of the past three weeks on the road, I’m still curious to explore the city and take the kind of notes that might end up shaping your future trips to Scotland. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

These past weeks have been intense, and unexpectedly sunny. There’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll stick to a simple, chronological order, not the most exciting structure, but probably the clearest way to make sense of it.

The tour started in London, where we presented the book at an urban art gallery in Camden, together with several artists featured in it, and I’m still processing how supportive they’ve all been, from those who joined the signing to my friend , who moderated the talk.

(I’ve shared a few short clips from my conversation with Stuart, you can find them on Substack Notes and Instagram)

The presentation turned into a party, and the energy felt right, with people moving through the space, getting their books signed, meeting each other, and taking the time to talk, beyond the kind of quick, surface-level exchanges that define most online interactions. What stayed with me, though, was something more specific: seeing people I usually know as usernames show up, say hello, and take up space in the same room. 🥰

Another moment that took us beyond the screen were the London walks I led for a small group of readers from this newsletter, off-the-grid explorations where we moved through the city together, observing, talking, and exploring side by side, spending time together around a shared interest.

Each book grows out of moments like these, since it is during the trip itself that Paolo photographs the city and gathers the material that will later shape the book, and once the book is ready, we return for a second journey, where the launch becomes a shared experience and readers can meet the artists and continue those conversations in person.

With every trip, this part of the project is starting to matter more, especially as familiar faces are coming back, alongside new ones who shift the dynamic each time, something that was particularly clear in London, where each group seemed to create its own rhythm and atmosphere.

From London, I flew to Aberdeen for Nuart Festival, where I’m back once again as a media partner, a festival widely regarded as the most important in the street art world, and the one I feel closest to after writing about it for over a decade.

The days in Aberdeen were intense and precise, as always, shaped by conversations, talks, and ongoing exchanges around this year’s theme, Poetry is in the Streets, with a strong focus on text-based street art.

The kind of support I receive there, from both the team and the artists, comes with generous words about my work that I’m deeply grateful for, even if my mind has a habit of turning that appreciation into pressure almost immediately, the kind that can easily get in the way of the work if I’m not careful.

And so this year I made a deliberate choice to put the camera away and focus instead on interviewing the artists whose work resonated with me the most, moving away from documentation (which I still covered live on Instagram) and closer to conversation, which felt more aligned with the way I wanted to connect with the work and the artists more directly.

I’ve made several of my “crazy vlogs” about Nuart Festival in the past, both in Aberdeen and Norway, and this shift felt necessary, not as a rejection of that work, but as a way to move it forward, to find a sharper focus, and to move vertically rather than horizontally.

(I am filming a weekly vlog from Glasgow though, so you’ll still get some of the more chaotic, slightly nonsensical side of things alongside the writing.)

I’ll leave it here.

What follows, in this month’s editorial, is where those days in Aberdeen begin to settle into something more structured.

Until next month,

Giulia

✈️ Travel with me!

We’ve been planning a new street art trip, and it’s time to invite you to join us. This time, we’ll be exploring Berlin from August 27 to 31.

The trip is part of the research process for the upcoming Berlin book. I’ll guide you through the city, while Paolo captures it through his camera for the next volume of the As Seen on the Streets of… series. By joining this crowdfunding trip, you become part of that process, and you’ll receive a copy of the book once it’s published.

The programme isn’t ready yet, but since the group will be small, if you’re considering joining, just reply to this email and let me know. I’ll keep you in the loop and share all the details as soon as they’re ready.

Poetry is in the Streets

On my last day at Nuart Aberdeen, I joined a tour led by walking artist Alisa Oleva, where one of the exercises was to write down every word we encountered in the streets. As we moved through the city, it quickly became clear that, aside from a handful of tags and a couple of poems by festival artist V2K, most of what we were reading was either telling us what to do or what not to do, or trying to sell us something.

What I noticed that day reflects something broader: rarely do words in public space invite us to think about ourselves, or to engage with a place in a way that feels genuinely our own. The same dynamic extends to the other space we all inhabit, the digital one, where language is largely shaped by news and advertising, addressing us as demographics, as voters, or as customers, often with a clear agenda, if not outright propaganda.

In both cases, there is little room for language that speaks to more personal, less instrumental dimensions of experience. What we encounter instead is language designed to direct, or to sell, rarely to connect with us in a way that feels personal or lasting.

Poetry carries a certain opacity, a gap in meaning that resists full understanding, and it is within that gap that something else can take shape, a space for interpretation, for projection, for thought.

It is within that space that the artists of this year’s Nuart Aberdeen began to move, each responding to the theme in a different way. Some approached it directly through poetry, working with language in its most immediate form, while others explored it more broadly, engaging with the tension between text and image.

This is something I had already touched on in an essay I wrote before the festival, where I argued for a shift in focus from image to language, looking at text-based street art as a response to the growing dominance of large-scale figurative murals, works that are often technically impressive and visually pleasing, yet sometimes conceptually limited, and increasingly closer to billboard advertising than to something that invites reflection.

What interested me was the possibility of reshaping the relationship between the work and its audience. You are not observing it from below, you are reading it, and reading implies a different kind of involvement. I was drawn to a form of writing in the streets that could disrupt expectations shaped by cities accustomed to being visually enhanced, where art is expected to beautify and anything that interrupts that expectation risks feeling out of place.

Looking back at this edition, though, it became clear that text does not simply replace the image. In many cases, it generates one. Through the way letters are drawn, shaped, and distributed in space, language itself begins to operate visually, producing images in the mind as much as on the wall.

After all, this entire culture begins with writing, with kids reshaping the alphabet on trains and walls, stretching letters beyond their basic forms, sometimes to the point of abstraction. One of the artists at this year’s festival, Remi Rough, is there precisely as a reminder of that trajectory, his practice moving from letters to style, into abstraction, while retaining something inherently poetic: a sense of rhythm runs through his compositions, which he himself describes as “visual haikus.”

His work traces the path from letters to image, while the festival moves in the opposite direction, from image back to language. Things, when pushed far enough, turn into their opposite.

And so what I had initially imagined as a shift now feels more like a loop, where text and image fold into each other, each carrying traces of the other rather than standing in opposition.

After seeing how the concept unfolded in the streets, it became clear that the idea of poetry taking over the city is not only about rebalancing the dominance of large-scale figurative murals. It is also a way of freeing poetry from its usual contexts, bringing it back into daily life, allowing people to encounter it again without mediation.

During the Nuart Plus programme, festival artist gave a talk that began with a quote by Philip K. Dick: “The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” In VALIS (1981), the “trash stratum” refers to the overlooked layer of reality, where meaning emerges from what is usually ignored.

In Aberdeen, I found myself thinking about that idea in reverse, poetry moving out of its more protected contexts and into the public space we all inhabit. One afternoon, while documenting The Writing is on the Wall as he was tattooing the city with his poems, I saw an older woman stop, read one of the lines, take a moment, and then say to the artist, “you really touched my heart with that.” And the sentence sat there, right next to a seagull’s mess on the wall. Symbols of the divine showing up at the trash stratum, indeed.

What I witnessed felt less like emergence and more like a redistribution: when poetry, or even a moment of disruption like Dr.D’s altered road signs, enters the streets, it can do something, however small, for someone.

In that sense, this movement echoes the early gestures of street art itself, when images were taken out of institutional spaces and placed directly in the urban landscape.

It is no coincidence that artists working in this context, those who offer their art to the public without guarantees or expectations of return (“even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth: you owe me”), are the ones who carry that gesture forward.

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, this month we land in Naples 🇮🇹, my favorite Italian city.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Naples. It’s the kind of place I escape to, even just for a day, when I need to reset. There’s an energy here that cuts through the noise and somehow puts things back into place, even at my lowest.

Naples unfolds like a maze of narrow alleys, where laundry catches the light above your head and small taverns seem to pull you in without asking. Everything feels dense, alive, and layered: the same streets that carry centuries of stories, also host a lot of unsanctioned street art and graffiti.

The roots of the city’s street art scene go back further than most people think. In the 1980s, pioneers like Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Blek le Rat were invited to Naples through a French cultural program. At the time, they didn’t even define themselves as street artists, yet the works they left in the city marked a turning point: for the first time, art in Naples was happening outside museums and directly in the streets.

Around the same years, local artist Felice Pignataro was developing a completely different approach. His practice was collective, deeply political, and rooted in difficult neighborhoods like Scampia. For him, muralism wasn’t decoration, but a tool for social change, a way to reclaim space and voice.

These pioneers opened a path that later intertwined with a local movement rooted in graffiti. Artists like Cyop & Kaf brought a harsher, more uncompromising visual language, shaped by the rawness of writing culture, yet they also recognized in Pignon-Ernest an origin point for what would become a distinctly Neapolitan approach to street art.

Even Banksy passed through Naples between 2004 and 2005, partly drawn by the connection that Blek le Rat had already established with the city (of the works he left behind, only one remains today).

All this energy is still here, suspended between past and present, between raw expression and collective memory.

Let’s explore it together, one neighborhood at a time!

🇮🇹 In this Naples mini-guide you will find:

• Naples’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Naples Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Naples Mood.

Naples’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods

Read more

Subscribe now

This month’s editorial looks at Banksy’s anonymity, and why breaking it means missing the point of the work.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

how are you doing?

I’m enjoying these last days at home before festival season begins, reading a lot and drinking even more tea.

This month has been all about the final stretch of the Lisbon book. I’m wrapping things up before handing everything over to Paolo who, from this issue onward, is taking care of both photography and graphic design. At some point we realised that relying on others was slowing us down, so we decided to handle everything ourselves.

The most demanding part has been reaching out to artists for image permissions. I contacted 110 street artists and, if you’ve been following the behind the scenes of our independent series As Seen on the Streets of…, you’ll know this is the most frustrating part, because artists often forget to reply, along with the part where I actually have to sell the book. 😅

At the same time, I’ve been working on one of my favourite parts: creating the collages and the paperback cover. That’s the part that reminds me why I enjoy the DIY experience in the first place.

I’m glad I managed to close everything before festival season starts. I feel lighter now, and confident about this book. We made clear improvements compared to the previous two, and the artist selection is strong. For the first time, I managed to bring in ALL the Lisbon-based artists I had dreamed of involving, which was not the case with the previous books.

Before getting into the Banksy unmasking, I want to share one more Banksy-related thing: this month I was invited to present the book A Bristol con Banksy by Andrea Lucarini, and it meant a lot.

Since I mostly work for street art festivals abroad and my blog is in English, it’s rare for me to be invited to speak in my own city, so I really appreciated the chance to talk about Bristol and its rebellious side with .

BTW, I’ll be back in Bristol in May, spending the whole month there. If you happen to be around on May 16th, I’d love to see you at Upfest, Europe’s largest street art festival, where I’ll be presenting our London street art book.

Before that, I’ll be in London, Aberdeen and Glasgow 🤩 I’m looking forward to being back in the UK and meeting some of you along the way!

Until next month,
Giulia

✈️ Travel with me!

There are still a couple of spots left for the Northern London itinerary (Friday, April 17th) and the Southern London itinerary (Saturday, April 18th).

Just reply to this email if you are interested!

📚 Updates on my book As Seen on the Streets of London

The book continues to receive enthusiastic reviews from journalists working across street art as well as travel and London-focused media. 🥰

Below you’ll find links to the latest articles I haven’t shared with you yet:

• The book was recommended by Graffiti Art Magazine:

  

• Inspiring City - “As Seen on the Streets of London by Giulia Blocal”

• Art Mag - “As Seen on the Streets of London: Inside a Living City”

• Street Art Press - “As Seen on the Streets of London: Straight from the Walls”

• Together with , we explored the underground soul of London in the debut print issue of Artuu Magazine:

• Disagian also interviewed me for Artuu Mag website: “Londra, graffiti e gentrificazione dentro il progetto editoriale di Giulia Riva aka Blocal Travel”

• Finally, with we talked about the relationship between music and street art, in London and beyond:

  Indie Riviera

  "La Street Art è molto simile all'improvvisazione musicale" intervista a Giulia Riva

  Il legame a doppio filo tra la musica e la street art non lo scopriamo certo oggi. Già alla sua nascita, nella New York degli anni 70, la cultura hip hop metteva assieme DJ, MC, breakdance e writing. Da allora questo dialogo non si è mai interrotto, anzi si è intensificato…

  Read more

  6 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Francesco P

📆 Come celebrate the book with us on April 17th at Camden Open Air Gallery in London. Bring your copy and have it signed by the street artists featured in the book!

After London, the book tour continues to Aberdeen for Nuart Festival, Glasgow for Yardworks Festival, and Bristol for Upfest.

See you on the road! 😉

We Don’t Want to Know Who Banksy Is

There was never that much to reveal. We already knew who Banksy was, or at least, we knew enough. His name has been circulating for almost twenty years, resurfacing every few years in what has become a media ritual, each time repackaged as a breakthrough.

This was never a mystery to solve, nor a void to fill. It was, much more simply, an individual choice to be respected. Treating it as something to expose for clicks means missing the point of Banksy’s work altogether.

To understand why, you have to step slightly outside the media narrative and look at how anonymity actually functions within street art. In this context, anonymity is not an exception, it is the baseline. In graffiti especially, it is a structural condition of the practice, not a stylistic quirk.

There is a very simple rule that anyone working in this field learns immediately: you do not expose an artist who has chosen to remain anonymous. If you take photos, you ask for consent before showing a face. If you know a name, you keep it to yourself. Breaking that rule is not just bad etiquette, it is considered disrespectful and, more importantly, a form of betrayal.

This matters because it dismantles a common assumption. Banksy’s anonymity is often framed as a calculated branding strategy, a clever way to generate hype around a persona. But within this context, anonymity is neither unusual nor exceptional; it is common practice, and just as commonly, it is respected.

People within the scene knew, and still, there was a tacit agreement to leave that boundary intact, because the mystery itself had become part of the artwork.

Why Banksy’s Anonymity Matters

Banksy’s anonymity removed the noise that usually surrounds an artist, or any public figure: the biography, the personality, the gossip. In a culture increasingly structured around visibility and recognition, where celebrity often becomes the primary lens through which work is consumed, that absence performs a very specific function: it interrupts the logic of celebrity culture and redirects attention to the image and the message.

At the same time, anonymity is not just a conceptual device. It is a condition of freedom. Many of Banksy’s works are political, or at the very least, inconvenient in the contexts in which they appear, and anonymity is what allows those interventions to exist in the first place.

And before anyone argues that Banksy is hardly some radical activist in need of protection, it is worth remembering that in the country where he lives, pro-Palestinian activism has already been met with arrests, prosecutions, and the use of anti-terror legislation. The threshold for becoming “inconvenient” is often much lower than people assume.

Banksy himself put it more simply: “Invisibility is a superpower.”

Why They Did It, For Real

So the question is not “Who is Banksy?” but: Why insist on answering it?

This is not about exposing a criminal, there is no public danger being neutralized, no urgent truth being revealed. What is being satisfied here is something much smaller: curiosity. Or worse, the need to turn anything that already carries attention into content.

You see it in the methods as much as in the outcome. Asking people in a war zone like Ukraine to recognize a face from a series of photos, in order to identify an allegedly anonymous artist, is not just detachment from context. It reveals a complete lack of empathy, a willingness to pursue a story regardless of what surrounds it.

And the consequences follow the same logic. In the days following the unmasking, the image of a Greek construction worker photographed near the Finsbury Park mural began to spread, misidentified as Banksy and amplified through reposts and headlines designed to maximize clicks rather than accuracy. The rule here is: visibility first, verification later.

Once that mechanism is in motion, it does not stop at misinformation. The same image becomes raw material for AI-generated content, fake videos, and low-effort scams, all feeding on the same confusion, all exploiting the same attention. None of this is accidental: this is the ecosystem that forms around a story built for traction.

Banksy is not just an artist, but a generator of attention. Every piece of news associated with his name generates clicks, and therefore value. And that value is exactly what this kind of journalism is designed to capture, not public interest.

What Gets Lost

In this process of chasing virality, something more subtle gets lost: the balance that made the work powerful in the first place. Banksy’s work has always existed in a tension between presence and absence, between a name that carries weight and an identity that remains just out of reach.

That distance is not accidental. It is what keeps the work from collapsing entirely into the person behind it, what prevents the image from being reduced to biography, gossip, or personality. It leaves room for the work to operate on its own terms, without being immediately absorbed into the narrative of the artist.

Remove that distance, and you do not simply reveal the artist, you change the conditions under which the work is read. The image remains, but its meaning becomes more fixed, more easily contained, more easily consumed.

What gets lost is not the mystery for its own sake, but the space that mystery created, the space in which the work could resist being fully explained, and where the work could still hold a certain kind of magic.

✍️ New on the blog!

Nuart Aberdeen 2026: How text-based street art is reshaping the culture.

Look around most cities today and the dominant image is either a huge billboard or an equally huge mural, often technically impressive, sometimes conceptually thin, almost always produced through a structure that involves funding, permissions, and a level of professionalisation that quietly filters out most people before they even begin. What presents itself as public art is often the result of a controlled process, and the outcome tends to reflect that control.

This is where the tension sits: street art still carries the language of openness and rebellion, but much of its visible output depends on systems that resemble the very institutions it once pushed against. The more resources a work requires, the fewer people are able to produce it, and the further the practice drifts from the idea that the street is an accessible platform.

Keep Reading on the blog!

Street Art in Lavapiés, Madrid

Lavapiés has long been the epicenter of street art in Madrid. Historically a working class district marked by migration, underground culture and a strong squatting movement, its narrow streets offered artists a rare degree of freedom during the early years of urban art in the city.

Over time the neighbourhood has changed profoundly, and street art has accompanied that transformation. From the discreet geometric interventions of Eltono in the 2000s to the large-scale murals that now mark many of its streets, urban art has become both a symbol of Lavapiés’ creativity and one of the most visible signs of its ongoing gentrification.

Keep reading on the blog!

Street Art in Malasaña, Madrid

Malasaña is one of the most important neighbourhoods for street art in Madrid, with murals, graffiti and painted shutters scattered across its streets. I lived in Malasaña between 2004 and 2006, just as street art was beginning to take hold in the neighbourhood. This article is therefore not only a guide to the street art you can still find here today, but also a look back at the underground movements, squats and artist studios that shaped Malasaña during the years when urban art was emerging in Madrid and gradually spreading from these streets to the rest of the city.

Keep reading on the blog!

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris, “like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona, this month we land in Amsterdam 🇳🇱, the city I once called home.

It wasn’t love at first sight.

Many of you already know that I moved to Amsterdam in 2018 to work on the opening of STRAAT, the museum for graffiti and street art. Until the job interview, I had never been to the city. In fact, I had no real intention of going. Amsterdam had not sparked much curiosity in me.

So my relationship with the city began in a slightly unusual way: I did not choose Amsterdam, I chose the job.

For that reason, my years there carried a mix of attraction and resistance. It was a city I had not actively sought, and for a long time I kept a certain distance from it.

Only after moving back to Italy did I start noticing what I missed. One thing above all: mobility. Amsterdam runs on bicycles, and the entire city is built around that rhythm. The fact that it is compact and easy to cross changes the texture of daily life in a very concrete way, because getting around is simple and fluid.

So let’s get on a bike and explore Amsterdam together. 🚲

🇳🇱 In this Amsterdam mini-guide you will find:

• Amsterdam’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Amsterdam Map;

• Books, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Amsterdam Mood.

Amsterdam’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods:

Read more

Subscribe now

While the newsletter on the 1st of every month will always remain free for everyone, I’ve started writing these occasional paywalled editions as a way to thank those of you who help keep this space alive and open to all.

In this *special edition* I’m sharing a curated selection of links from the newsletter archive spanning 2014 to 2019.

Enjoy — and see you in your inbox on April 1st with the regular edition of this newsletter.

Giulia

This week I closed my Mailchimp account and, before letting it go for good, I found myself wandering through the archive one last time, rereading the monthly newsletters I sent between 2014 and 2019. (In 2020 I moved to Substack and the format changed completely).

Back then, I used to share with you many more links, not only about street art but also films, TV shows, essays, music, stand-up comedy, and all sorts of discoveries that had caught my attention during the month. Closing the account meant that all of that material would disappear, so I decided to copy it here. Not every single link, there were simply too many, but I selected them with this question in mind: would I still share this today?

Because I want this post to work as a small archive, I have organised the links into sections, from films and TV shows to YouTube channels, stand-up comedy, podcasts, songs, articles, and books, so that you can browse them freely and follow your own path through the list.

I hope you will find something here that still resonates with you and perhaps opens a new thread of curiosity. 😊

Read more

Subscribe now

This month’s editorial looks at the evolving relationship between street art and corporate power: starting from the recent dispute between Pose and Michaels and revisiting earlier conflicts involving Ernest Zacharevic, Revok, and Banksy, we’ll reflect on the limits of copyright protection and the imbalance that emerges when artists attempt to assert control over their work.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

how are you doing?

Let’s start with the monthly check in. In February, too, I worked on the Lisbon book every single day. Pat pat on my shoulder.

I’m really excited about this book. With each new title something becomes clearer, sharper. London was already a big step forward compared to Paris, and now Lisbon is allowing me to push the structure, the research, and the narrative even further. There is a very concrete sense of evolution, which comes from building the rules as I go and refining the method book after book.

This is both the privilege and the core difficulty of the process. I cannot lean on the standard rules of the publishing market, because for an independent and highly specialized project they simply do not apply. There is no ready-made system to rely on, so I have to construct it piece by piece, adjusting the structure as I experiment.

On my 2026 vision board I wrote:

I repeat it to myself every day and keep going.

And as I move through the interviews and refine the structure of the book, a recurring theme begins to emerge: a longing for a Lisbon that no longer exists.

A dusty, worn, simple city.

Chapter after chapter, I find myself writing about this shared saudade for a place that has slipped into memory. At some point, it pushes me to look for my own fragments of that city: the analog photographs I took on my first trip to Lisbon, twenty six years ago.

And so I turned my parents’ house upside down, searching through drawers and old cabinets. In the end, I uncovered a small time capsule: film photos, tram cards, museum tickets, party flyers, stickers. A collection of objects from a city that captured my heart the first time I walked its streets, notebook in hand, determined to write down everything that caught my eye, above all the graffiti scrawled across its walls.

Looking at those images now, I wonder whether those first impressions still matter. Every street artist I have spoken to has said the same thing: that Lisbon is gone.

What remains are faded negatives and sentences scribbled in a notebook.

And the question of whether they deserve a place in the book, or whether they belong to a Lisbon that survives only in memory.

Until next month,
Giulia

✈️ Travel with me!

Just a little heads up: the early bird rate for our London street art trip wraps up on March 5th.

If you’ve been thinking about joining us, this is your moment.

London Street Art Trip: 16 - 20 April

📚 Updates on my book As Seen on the Streets of London

Big news! The e-book format is now available! 🥳

We hesitated at first, but we have decided to release the ebook edition of the London book. It is for those who want a copy right away, without the delays of print-on-demand or international shipping.

The ebook arrives in your device immediately after purchase: you can start planning your itinerary, mapping out your days, and organizing your time in London right away.

Flying to London and need it today?

Start Planning Now!

📆 Come celebrate the book with us on April 17th at Camden Open Air Gallery in London. Bring your copy and have it signed by the street artists featured in the book.

After London, the book tour continues to Aberdeen for Nuart Festival, Glasgow for Yardworks Festival, and Bristol for Upfest.

See you on the road! 😉

An artist asked a company to stop using his work. They sued him.

Chicago muralist Jordan Nickel, known as Pose, recently discovered that one of his murals was being used on the website of the U.S. arts and crafts retailer Michaels to promote a spray paint brand sold by the company. According to the artist, he was never contacted, nor was any license requested or granted, despite the fact that the image appeared in a clearly commercial context tied directly to a product offering.

Rather than initiating a lawsuit or seeking financial damages, Nickel responded through his attorney with a cease-and-desist letter asking that the material would be removed. It was a formal assertion of his rights over his work and likeness, and arguably the most measured step available to him under the circumstances.

The company’s response escalated the matter: Michaels filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its use of the image did not infringe the artist’s rights, while also asking the court to require Nickel to cover its legal fees.

What makes this situation particularly unsettling is the profile of the corporation involved. Michaels is not an outsider to the creative ecosystem; its entire business model depends on artists, makers, designers, and independent creatives. It markets itself as a company for artists. Watching such a company respond to a takedown request with litigation introduces a contradiction that is difficult to ignore, not only because an artwork was allegedly used without permission, but because the escalation reframes a simple rights assertion as a legal confrontation.

When Brands Appropriate, Artists Push Back.

This is not the first time a corporation has attempted to use the work of a street artist for commercial purposes without consent. Last year, Ernest Zacharevic took legal action against AirAsia after the airline incorporated one of his murals into a promotional campaign without authorization. The artwork, originally created in Penang, was repurposed in marketing materials that clearly served the company’s brand positioning, turning a site-specific piece into a corporate asset.

I interviewed Ernest at the time to understand how the situation unfolded and why he chose to respond legally, and I added my own reflection on a recurring misconception: the idea that visibility in public space somehow weakens authorship (spoiler: it does not).

If you would like to revisit that conversation and editorial, you can read it here:

The most widely publicized confrontation of this kind remains the dispute between Los Angeles–based artist Revok and global fashion retailer H&M. The company used one of Revok’s murals as the backdrop for an advertising campaign, effectively transforming a piece conceived for the urban landscape into a commercial visual asset.

When the artist objected, H&M’s initial legal argument went further than a simple defense of fair use. In its court filings, the company contended that because the mural had been painted without property authorization, it was not protected by copyright. The underlying claim was clear and deeply consequential: that an artwork created without formal permission might not qualify for intellectual property protection at all.

I have addressed this tension before in this newsletter, particularly in relation to Banksy and the legal paradox surrounding his work. In order to defend certain images, Banksy was forced to register them as trademarks rather than rely solely on copyright protection, since filing for copyright would have required disclosing his identity.

Ownership Under Pressure.

These episodes reveal how unstable the legal ground beneath street art truly is. Urban artworks exist at the intersection of anonymity, contested legality, authorship, and commercial value. They are created in public space, often outside traditional institutional frameworks, yet they circulate within a cultural economy that assigns them visibility, desirability, and monetary worth.

The dispute between Pose and Michaels, when placed alongside the cases of Zacharevic and Revok, does not read as an isolated misunderstanding. It reflects a recurring pattern in which corporations draw cultural capital from street art, translating its visual language into brand value, while questioning or resisting the legal claims of artists once those artists assert control over their work.

At the center of this pattern lies a deeper contradiction. Ownership, in theory, grants the author the right to control reproduction and commercial use. Yet when the simple act of asking a corporation to stop using one’s work can trigger litigation, ownership begins to look less like a stable guarantee and more like a principle that depends on who has the resources to enforce it.

This is where the imbalance becomes visible. A cease-and-desist letter is a formal mechanism designed to resolve disputes without escalating them. When such a letter is met with a lawsuit, the conversation shifts from rights to endurance: who can sustain legal costs, who can absorb reputational pressure, who can afford to fight.

For a corporation whose business model relies on the purchasing power and loyalty of creatives, this tension carries symbolic weight. A company that presents itself as serving artists cannot treat the assertion of authorship as a threat. If it does, it risks undermining the very ecosystem on which it depends.

What these conflicts ultimately expose is that ownership in the context of street art is not only a legal matter. It is a question of power, recognition, and the structural conditions under which creative labor is valued or dismissed.

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, and Rome, this month we land in Barcelona 🇪🇸, the birthplace of Montana Colors, the iconic spray paint brand designed for graffiti and urban art. Under these circumstances, we are off to a good start!

Barcelona and street art go a long way back. For years, the city sat at the center of the European urban art scene, a place where graffiti was not only tolerated but actively shaped the visual identity of entire neighborhoods. It is no coincidence that Montana Colors, one of the most influential spray paint brands in the world, was born here. For a long time, Barcelona was considered a reference point for writers and street artists across Europe.

Things began to change in 2006, when the city council introduced much stricter regulations, with heavy fines, tighter controls, and systematic whitewashing. Walls that had once been open surfaces for experimentation were suddenly erased, and the street art scene was forced to either shrink or move elsewhere.

This shift cannot be separated from a larger transformation that was already going on: the 1992 Olympic Games, which reshaped Barcelona’s urban fabric and set the course for the city we know today.

Tourism has grown steadily ever since, pushing residents out of the historic center and turning entire areas into stages designed for consumption. Barcelona is now one of the European cities most affected by overtourism and gentrification, a city increasingly aligned with the interests of tourism and business.

And yet, street art never fully disappeared. So let’s go and find it, neighborhood by neighborhood, and see what it still manages to say about Barcelona today. 😎

🇪🇸 In this Barcelona mini-guide you will find:

• Barcelona’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;

• My Interactive Barcelona Map;

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Barcelona Mood.

Barcelona’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods

Read more

Subscribe now

This month’s editorial explores how graffiti and street art emerged as acts of presence in cities already dominated by advertising, looking at the tension between informal expression and commercial control of public space.

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Ciao,

how are you? how is 2026 treating you so far?

Mine has been pretty quiet, in a good way. 😊 I kept my new year resolution of working on the Lisbon street art book every single day, to the point that I occasionally had to move my writing session to a local cafe just to give myself a reason to get dressed and leave the house.

Not complaining though. While my days have been calm and repetitive, behind the scenes I have been organizing a seven-week book tour across the UK, so spring is going to be the exact opposite, and you should know by now that I thrive on this alternation (from couch to chaos 😂).

The tour will kick off in London with a five-day street art exploration that you are all invited to join (more details below). Then I will head to Aberdeen, Glasgow, Bristol, and finish with one last stop in London before flying back. I will share dates and details soon in case you feel like meeting on the road. For now, save the date for the first book signing in London: April 17th.

Building up to this self-organized tour has been pretty much the only excitement of the month. The rest of my days looked very similar, glued to my laptop, trying to finalize a solid draft of the Lisbon book before hitting the road for seven weeks.

The real highlights, though, were the virtual coffees I started having with friends who live abroad. There are so many interesting, creative people in my orbit that I wish I could see more often. This month I decided to remove the distance and simply make space for long, thoughtful conversations.

If you like the idea and would enjoy a virtual coffee, just reply to this email, I would genuinely love that. ☕

Until next month,

Giulia

✈️ Travel with me!

April 16 - 20: Unveil London’s Street Art with me!

Let’s celebrate together the release of our book As Seen on the Streets of London in the very place where it all began! 🤩

From April 16th to 20th, delve into the heart of London’s street art scene, discovering the soul of the city through its urban art. This is your chance to connect with fellow street art enthusiasts, meet local street artists, and experience London’s offbeat charm in a way that most visitors never will.

I’ve designed 5 experiences of 7 hours each, all individually bookable so you can design your trip exactly as you like it:

• April 16th – The Must-Sees

• April 17th – Northern London

📆 April 17th is also the date of our book party! Bring your copy to Camden Open Air Gallery to have it signed by the featured artists. The event starts at 6 PM and is open to everyone, even if you are not joining the urban walk earlier that day.

• April 18th – South-East

• April 19th – East End

• April 20th – South-West

Discover more

Rebalancing visual power between street art and advertising.

At its core, graffiti and street art began as acts of presence. Leaving a mark on a wall is a way of claiming a small piece of public space, and this very act sits within a broader struggle over who gets to use the city, who gets to speak through its surfaces, and which messages are allowed to dominate the visual landscape. This applies regardless of style, intention, or content; simply intervening in public space already carries political weight.

Who is allowed to speak in public space

Public space is often described as open and shared, but it is far from neutral: visibility in the street is regulated and paid for. Advertising enters public space through permits, contracts, and economic agreements that turn walls, facades, and streets into billboards.

Graffiti operates under completely different conditions. Writers work without authorization, on surfaces that are already owned or controlled by someone else. Their visibility is temporary and always at risk of removal.

This contrast reveals a clear hierarchy: the city allows certain messages to repeat themselves endlessly, while others are erased or never tolerated at all.

Advertising is built to last. Even when a campaign changes, the structures that support it remain in place. Graffiti and unsanctioned street art exist under the opposite conditions: removal is expected, sometimes immediate, sometimes delayed, but always “part of the game”.

This ephemerality is often seen as part of the art form itself. In reality, it is the result of unequal rules. One form of visibility is granted time and protection, while the other is denied both.

Public space as a marketplace

At this point, the economic logic behind visibility becomes hard to ignore. Public space increasingly functions as a marketplace, where (our) attention is the most valuable commodity and surfaces are treated as assets. In the street, advertising cannot be switched off, placing constant pressure on an already fragile attention.

This shift changes the role of public space itself. Instead of being a place for encounter, movement, or shared experience, it is repurposed as a channel for commercial messages.

Within this framework, anything that falls outside advertising’s rules is seen as disorderly. Graffiti is framed as the problem, even when it is responding to an environment that is already saturated.

Cities without billboards as counterexamples

If advertising dominance feels natural, it is largely because it is everywhere. Yet some cities have chosen to interrupt this logic, showing that commercial visibility is not an unavoidable feature of urban life.

A striking example is São Paulo, where the Lei Cidade Limpa law, introduced in 2007, led to the removal of almost all outdoor advertising, allowing buildings and architectural details to re-emerge and changing how the city was experienced.

In Europe, similar choices have taken more localized forms. Grenoble removed hundreds of advertising panels in 2014, replacing them with trees and civic information boards. Oslo introduced strict limits on large-scale and digital advertising in central areas and on public transport.

These cases show that visual pollution is a choice, shaped by policy and economic priorities. When those priorities change, the city looks and feels different.

Banksy captured this idea clearly in a video from 2007:

Rebalancing visual power

Marking a surface without permission exposes the imbalance between authorized visibility and informal presence. In a city where visibility is regulated, purchased, and carefully maintained, graffiti and street art are often framed as intrusions, or even acts of visual aggression.

This tension becomes especially clear in practices like subvertising, a street art practice born from the fusion of subvert and advertising, also known as brandalism (as in: brand + vandalism). By using the language and infrastructure of advertising against itself, subvertising turns ad space into a site of visual disobedience. I explored this practice before, so I am linking that newsletter from exactly three years ago:

Beyond subvertising, many artist-led initiatives work along similar lines. Projects like Art Over Ads bring artists together to collectively intervene on advertising spaces, covering corporate messages with artworks, a way of pushing back against the dominance of commercial imagery and reintroducing community presence into the visual fabric of the city.

In all these cases, the street is not treated as an empty canvas, but as a contested surface. A place where art responds to existing power structures and quietly asks a larger question: who is allowed to occupy the city, and under what conditions?

I rely on the support of readers like you to keep creating genuine and informative content. If you value my work and would like to see more of it, please consider making a donation to support my writing and my editorial project BLocal.

You can Buy me Pizzas, Donate via Paypal, or become a Paid Subscriber.

You can also buy my books, As Seen on the Streets of London & As Seen on the Street of Paris,“like” my newsletters by tapping the ❤️, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and forward this email to anyone you like.

Do you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter? Invite them to subscribe and win free months of the paid plan. 🎁

Invite a friend right away using this link or the button below.

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Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, and Paris, this month we arrive in Rome 🇮🇹, the city where I was born and the one that continues to draw me back, however long I am away.

Rome Sweet Home. Writing about my hometown is never easy. To do it properly, I have to set aside memories and personal attachments, and try to look at the city with fresh eyes, in order to give you an honest and possibly objective idea of what Rome off the beaten path might look like, sharing with you places that even many locals rarely notice.

Being objective is hard, and choosing is even harder. I love too many things of my city, too many stories layered together. This is also why I keep procrastinating As Seen on the Streets of Rome, happily escaping into writing about other cities instead. 😅

Rome is home, and when it comes to home, it is never easy to edit.

Anyway, let’s do it! 💪 (or as we Romans say, daje!)

🇮🇹 In this Rome mini-guide you will find:

• Rome’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals

• My Interactive Rome Map

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Rome Mood

Rome’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods

Read more

Subscribe now

This month’s editorial explores AI-generated street art, starting from the case of London’s Christmas mural, which included in its end-of-the-year article “The Year in Slop,” written by . (However, the first to explore this case here on Substack were and , so do check out their earlier reflections too.)

But first, a few updates on my life and the BLocal project.

Let’s jump in!

Happy New Year, my friends!

If this email finds you still half-wrapped in a blanket, moving slowly through the quiet haze between last year and the next, then it’s landing exactly where it should.

There’s something about this particular pocket of time that always draws me in. A soft pause where ideas can breathe before they’re put to the test, and where I find space to look back, dream forward, and figure out how to move through the year with a little more intention.

One of the brightest moments this month was welcoming some of you to the city we call home. After exploring other cities together, wandering through Rome with you made it feel both deeply familiar and entirely new.

As always, these urban walks we host aren’t just casual strolls. They are the heartbeat of our independent book series As Seen on the Streets of… They help fund the project and give us the chance to gather the images that later find their way onto the pages of the book.

Standing between what has just unfolded and what is still undefined is exactly what this time of year is about. This is the moment when I start thinking about who I want to be in the months ahead. Not in terms of drastic change, but in alignment: how I spend my time, what I commit to, and what I gently let go of.

And like every January, I’m sharing those intentions with you here, because sometimes just having someone else know what you’re trying to build is enough to keep you going.

💪 So, this is what I’ll be working towards in 2026:

✨ To bring As Seen on the Streets of Lisbon to life, with full commitment, thoughtfully, and with the care it deserves. If everything lines up, I’d love for you to be holding your copy by September.

✨ To have a cozy booth at a couple of art book fairs, the kind that focus on street art, graffiti, independent publishing, and zines.

✨ To organise a self-led book tour across the UK for As Seen on the Streets of London, moving from city to city, meeting readers along the way, and letting the book find its people on the road.

✨ To travel again with you, exploring street art scenes together in different cities. I’d love to host four street art trips over the course of 2026.

✨ And finally, the biggest challenge of all: spending a couple of months living in Brooklyn, returning to the roots of the Be Local project. Walking, watching, listening, and letting everyday life in a city shape my writing again.

This yearly ritual of sharing my intentions with you is something I genuinely treasure, especially because it has turned a personal practice into a shared one. Every January, some of you write back with your own goals, your own priorities, your own versions of “this is what I want to build.” When that happens, we make a simple pact: to check in with each other during the year, to see how things are unfolding, to encourage progress, and to acknowledge when plans shift or evolve.

Over time, this has created something rare and meaningful, and so, once again, I’m opening the invitation. If you feel like it, hit reply and tell me what you’re working toward in 2026. Big ambitions, small steps, messy drafts, or loose ideas are all welcome.

We’ll keep each other accountable, in a human and honest way. I can’t wait to root for you. 🥳

With warmth,
Giulia

✈️ Travel with me!

Our next street art trip is happening in April (16th - 20th), and we’ll be heading to London!

Expect urban exploration, artist encounters, and a special book launch night for As Seen on the Streets of London. 🥳 Spots are limited, so drop me a message or reply to this email if you'd like to come along.

📗 Updates on our book As Seen on the Streets of London

From yesterday, the paperback is officially available in bookshops worldwide, both in physical stores and through online retailers. This means that if you prefer buying from your local bookshop, they can now order it for you. 🥳

As I mentioned in my London vlog, the book has found its London home at Camden Open Air Gallery, a young gallery specialising in urban art. This is where the book signing will take place on April 17th (save the date!), with some of the artists featured in the book joining to sign your copy. 😉 It is also where you can already find the book in stock, no waiting, no ordering required.

Of course, you can still purchase the book directly through me online, which remains the best option when it comes to print quality.

The book continues to receive enthusiastic reviews from journalists working across street art as well as travel and London-focused media. 🥰

Below you’ll find links to the latest articles I haven’t shared with you yet:

• on - “London’s Street Art Culture Celebrated in Astonishing New Book”

• on - “The Story of London Trough Street Art”

• [podcast] - “Giulia Blocal’s As Seen on the Streets of London”

• SKY TG24 - “30 Libri di Viaggio da Regalare a Natale”

• Collater.al - “Libri che consigliamo”

London’s Nightmarish Christmas Mural shows what happens when AI replaces artists

A large Christmas mural generated using artificial intelligence was installed in southwest London. Intended to evoke a festive winter scene inspired by the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the image instead unsettled viewers with its distorted figures and surreal inconsistencies.

From a distance, it appeared to depict a frozen Thames animated by crowds and winter activity.

Up close, the image revealed an unsettling accumulation of visual anomalies: grotesquely contorted faces, warped Santa Clauses and snowmen, animals bleeding into one another, and figures with misshapen bodies struggling to skate across shallow, foamy water, while elsewhere crowds packed into an improbably oversized wooden boat.

As photos circulated widely on social media, public reaction ranged from mockery to concern, with many questioning how such a visibly flawed and unsettling image was approved for display in a shared urban space.

The Chicago Mural Controversy

Sadly, this AI-generated mural isn’t an isolated case. Earlier this year in Chicago, a public mural sparked significant backlash after it emerged that the artwork was generated by artificial intelligence rather than created by a local artist or through community collaboration.

What had been expected to be a celebration of community and culture instead drew criticism as it lacked the authenticity, nuance and human voice typical of murals in the city’s long public-art tradition, while at the same time bypassing opportunities for real artists to contribute to public narrative and place-making.

AI in Public Art: A Question of Representation and Responsibility

Both episodes have sparked broader conversation about the role of AI in public art, authenticity in representation, and how decisions about mural production should involve community voices rather than defaulting to automated tools.

I found images online of the slogan “Hire real artists” spray-painted over other examples of AI-generated urban art, an understandable and legitimate reaction that speaks to a deeper unease about how generative AI is being deployed in public contexts.

The criticism is not simply a rejection of technology, but a response to processes that replace human labour, authorship, and community work with automated image production. In street art, the role of the artist extends beyond producing an image: it involves research, intention, dialogue with the community, analysis of the context, vision, and accountability.

With AI-generated works, instead, the result feels disconnected, hollow or careless, reinforcing the perception that speed and cost have been prioritised over meaning and craft.

🤔 But What If the Distorted Christmas Mural Was Intentional?

Today’s AI is far too advanced to produce such blatant hallucinations by accident, and that is what makes those bizarre visuals feel to me intentional rather than careless. I read the accumulation of errors, distortions and surreal mismatches less like a technical failure and more like a provocation, one designed to force viewers to confront the role of the artist, or the absence of one.

While researching, I came across a persistent rumour attributing the mural to Mat Collishaw, a YBA artist known for his long-standing interest in provocation and, more recently, for his extensive use of AI as an artistic tool. That connection is what fuelled the speculation in the first place. Although no confirmation ever arrived and the artist did not respond to multiple requests for comment, the idea remains compelling. At the very least, it suggests the possibility that an artist deliberately amplified AI’s visual hallucinations to trigger a debate about authorship, intention and responsibility in public space.

This reading feels to me more convincing than the alternative explanation of an unsupervised intern, a rushed approval process and a 100-foot image installed without anyone noticing that something was fundamentally off.

What remains difficult to understand for me is why no one has stepped forward to explain that the mural may have been made on purpose, a silence that ultimately weakens its potential to be read as a deliberate artistic gesture rather than a simple oversight.

If that were the case, then the outrage, confusion and discussion it generated, culminating in the mural being torn down shortly after installation, should be seen not as failures but as outcomes.

After all, this is exactly what meaningful art has always done: unsettle, provoke, invite interpretation, and push us to question how images are made, who makes them, and why.

🔄 Updated!

I’ve added Banksy’s Christmas pieces to my blogpost on all of Banksy’s works in London, exploring where to find them and the meanings behind each artwork.

Read it on the blog!

I’ve added new art galleries discovered during my latest London trip to my blogpost about street art galleries in London.

Read it on the blog!

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Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, and London, this month we land in Paris 🇫🇷 the city that became the protagonist of my first street art book, As Seen on the Streets of Paris.

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Paris often presents itself as a finished image: grand façades, carefully framed views, the Seine sliding past monuments you already know by heart. Yet the city has always been shaped by friction. What appears composed and orderly above ground is matched by something restless, experimental, and unresolved beneath it.

More than other cities, Paris is built on the tension between a polished surface and a raw underground, sometimes quite literally, in a forbidden city below street level where subcultures have long found room to exist, as you’ll discover in this mini-guide.

Refinement and raw creativity coexist in Paris, traced not only in stone and architecture, but in spray paint. Hip hop culture, graffiti, and street art did not arrive as decoration, but as necessity, rooted in lived spaces and social tension, helping to pioneer these cultures in Europe. This undercurrent does not oppose the city’s elegance; it runs alongside it, subtly reshaping how the whole picture holds together.

I still stand by the saying that Paris is always a good idea. But an even better one is to move beyond the postcards and look for a different Paris, the one that rarely appears in guidebooks. Because Paris is at the forefront of multiple cultural scenes, you just need to know where to look.

And so, subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already, and let’s get started!

🇫🇷 In this Paris mini-guide you will find:

• Paris’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods

• My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries

• Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss

• Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals

• My Interactive Paris Map

• Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Paris Mood

Paris’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods

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