Pisa, Italy's largest street art trail unveiled

In Pisa inaugurated the largest route dedicated to urban art in Italy. A kind of large street art museum with four thousand square meters of painted surfaces, with the participation of 15 creators and the presence of 25 scattered works. In this city that welcomed Keith Haring and preserves his last fresco - Tuttomondo - a new generation of artists has animated over time a series of creations scattered among the city’s heart, the Darsena and the Porta a Mare district. This is a complex and protracted intervention over time, which from the beginning has been orchestrated by the Start Attitude association and its founder Gian Guido Grassi, with the support of the Council of the Region of Tuscany, the Province and Municipality of Pisa, the Pisa Foundation and the Palazzo Blu Foundation.

A young, if not very young, project: in fact, the stART Attitude association was founded in June 2017 and counts on a team of young creatives under 35 with complementary skills, including photographers, videomakers, press officers and social media marketing experts, and yet it already has solid experience in organizing reviews, festivals, exhibitions and publications in the field of contemporary art. At the helm as curator is Gian Guido Maria Grassi, born in Lucca in 1988, who specializes in contemporary art and inherited his passion from his family. Grassi has directed festivals, curated and organized exhibitions in both institutional and private spaces, as well as written articles, published volumes and collaborated with Italian and foreign artists, including Russian Alexey Morosov and Uruguayan Pablo Atchugarry.

The itinerary among the works of street art in Pisa was inaugurated following the completion of the murals created by Etnik and Zed1 at the Pisa Hydraulic Police Depot, as part of the first edition of the Festival della Strada (visited by 30,000 people between October 2023 and January 2024), and thanks to a vast urban regeneration project promoted by the Council of the Region of Tuscany: the route is to be explored on foot or by bicycle, to discover the history and present of the city of the Leaning Tower and of an ever-evolving art, which has recently been joined by top museums and cultural institutions.

It all began in 2017 with the creation of the first cycle of murals in the Porta a Mare neighborhood, created by some of Italy’s most renowned street artists, called upon to revitalize a district of Pisa that still retains traces of its ancient seafaring vocation. The international guest of that first edition was Gaia, the author of an impressive work on the exterior walls of the Saint Gobain company, a major multinational sustainable building company with operational headquarters in Pisa. Directing the operation at the time was Gian Guido Grassi, who was able to attract the likes of Ozmo, Zed1, Etnik, Fra32, Aris, Moneyless, Tellas, Alberonero, Beast, Rusto, AEC Interesni Kazki, and IMOs in two years of the event (2017 and 2018).

The event was inspired by the legacy of Keith Haring and Total Panic, a 1990s event that started out as an underground gathering of street artists and became a draw for urban artists from around the world. Consolidating this spirit were temporary exhibitions and live painting events that featured some of the city’s most important events, including several editions of the Internet Festival. This tradition culminated in the collective Attitude (Dec. 11, 2021-April 3, 2022), an exhibition that involved some 50 of the most interesting contemporary urban artists, bringing works of different genres from the street to the palace: in this case, Palazzo Blu, one of the main art centers in Italy. The exhibition accompanied and in some ways looked beyond the retrospective dedicated to Keith Haring himself during the same period.

Toward the end of 2023, the first edition of the Festival della Strada featured artists who each found their own “canvas” among the rooms of Palazzo Blu, the church of Santa Maria della Spina and precisely the streets. Kobra, famous in Brazil and known worldwide for his large works with bright colors and social themes, created one of the largest murals in Italy on the Maccarrone Center, inspired by the discoveries of Galileo Galilei and the nature of Pisa as a city of science, innovation and exploration (by sea and sky). Moneyless, Etnik, Zed1, Aris, Gio Pistone, Massimo Sospetto (involved in the festival together with Portuguese Gonzalo Borondo and the pioneer of muralist abstractionism in Italy 108) have contributed prestigious works to the collection of murals in the Porta a Mare neighborhood. The itinerary also ideally includes the neighboring municipality of Vecchiano, where Roman artist Gio Pistone transformed a playground into a work of art, as part of a project supported by the Council of the Region of Tuscany and the Municipality of Vecchiano, with the involvement of UMMA Playground.

The current itinerary of the open-air museum extends from Kobra’s mural on Via Silvio Pellico, on the outskirts of the historic center and a stone’s throw from Keith Haring’s Tuttomondo, to the Darsena, including the pylons of the Florence-Pisa-Livorno road, which have become the subject of artistic interventions. The open-air museum of urban art in Pisa has also been made possible thanks to technical sponsors such as Renato Lupetti and Caparol, and has always been able to count on the wide participation of the citizenry, starting with Coop Members and the Down Association, who have also actively collaborated in the creation of some works.

Statements

“Street art has the unique characteristic of bringing art into people’s daily lives, you don’t need to go into a museum building to admire it, it succeeds in making our neighborhoods more beautiful,” says Antonio Mazzeo, president of the Tuscany Regional Council. “This is also a part of the beauty that our Tuscany gives us in the villages, in the historic centers, in our landscapes, hilly and seaside, but also on the walls of a building. This intervention fits virtuously into an urban context that in recent years has become a true open-air museum on street art. A district of the city that has found precisely in this an essential feature of its new identity, which as the two works inaugurated today well represent on the one hand keeps its roots firmly in the past and on the other confronts the present and opens up to the future.”

“The bond that the Pisa Foundation,” says President Stefano Del Corso, “has built with the Start Association, led by Gian Guido Grassi, began a long time ago and has consolidated initiative after initiative. Starting with the Attitude exhibition at Palazzo Blu in 2021/2022, continuing with the Festival della Strada - also hosted at Palazzo Blu until a few weeks ago - and finally reaching the mural dedicated to Galileo Galilei and signed by Brazilian artist Kobra. So we wanted to try to give space to street art, welcomed in the rooms of the museum but also outside, in the places where it was originally born.”

“The Province of Pisa,” says President Massimiliano Angori, “has followed and encouraged the project that saw the birth of the mural dedicated to Galileo Galilei both because of the direct involvement of our Maccarrone Center but, more generally, because we believe in the cultural journey as a whole, and in the importance that these urban art interventions assume in enhancing places, and in strengthening a bond of identity with those who live and animate those places. In December I had the pleasure and honor of visiting at Palazzo Blu the exhibition featuring the works of Eduardo Kobra, one of the highlights of the Festival della Strada, all curated by Gian Guido Grassi. Works that deliver a powerful social message, often revisiting famous figures in a modern key, creating a kind of bridge between our hectic present and the historical memory to which the characters themselves belong. And I can also bear witness to this in my capacity as Mayor of Vecchiano, where a beautiful intervention was made that turned a basketball court into a work of art, with a message that is as beautiful as it is powerful even for the youngest generations, engaged in building their personalities.”

“We are pleased to celebrate today an important milestone in the Start Attitude - Festival of the Street project, which, with the creation of the largest open-air museum dedicated to urban art in Italy, brings Pisa to its place among the European capitals of street art,” stresses the mayor of Pisa, Michele Conti. “An immediate and popular art form that also in our city is contributing strongly to regenerate urban areas undergoing transformation and neighborhoods that can acquire a new cultural and social identity. As the Municipal Administration, we strongly support the project that has made it possible to create a new urban itinerary, a path of diffuse art between the center and the Porta a Mare neighborhood, thanks to the creativity of new-generation artists who have been able to draw inspiration from the great characters and history of our city identity.”

“When we imagined bringing urban art to Porta a Mare,” explains Gian Guido Grassi, “the neighborhood was a bit hesitant, afraid that this art form might not belong to it. This is a neighborhood rich in history, where the authenticity of Pisa is still lived, where its spirit of the Maritime Republic is still felt, where boats are built, it is the neighborhood of the Navicelli canal, of the bombing of August 1943, of the ’68 riots, of the factories and Saint Gobain. Each wall tells a little piece of this history: the artists were able to draw from these passages and translate them into universal values. The community has finally embraced this project, finding its identity in this widespread museum. Because urban art is something that upsets everyone when it happens, but it is also something that remains: an event like the Street Festival is not only an event capable of involving the community and associative realities, but it becomes part of the legacy of the city itself.”

Pisa, Italy's largest street art trail unveiled

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