Score an awesome internship with the manager of street artists in Rome: check. Figure out the bus schedule and get to meeting point on time: check. First order of internship business: personal tour of famous street art in San Lorenzo.

Today my fellow intern and I (we both got the position, woohoo!) made our way through undiscovered neighborhoods in Rome on the 492 and ended up in San Lorenzo again to meet with our internship director. She is an entrepreneur, photographer, and manager for several up and coming street artists; her most prominently known friend and business partner is Alice Pasquini. We met up at the cafe at which we had our interviews last week and immediately set out for a personal guided tour around the local streets for a mini-introduction to the street art culture in Rome and some of the most well-known artists in the area. The street art culture is not something completely foreign to me, as Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop is one of my favorite films; however, I never expected to be working this closely with an art form as free flowing and edgy as street art.

Our director began by pointing out the differences between graffiti and street art. Graffiti usually refers to writing and script emblazoned on walls, incorporating sub-genres such as tagging in which people scribble their names/pseudonyms. It is often illegible to the regular eye, but she explained how the community consists of a semi-closed circle of participants, so while the normal passerby would see a myriad of spray painted lines, those who tag and perform their own graffiti (who are familiar with and part of the culture) can immediately recognize letters and symbols and what they mean. Stenciling is sort of the next rung up the ladder in which people will create paper cutouts of their design for quick application onto walls, as much of the time putting paint on the street is illegal. Street art has gained recent appreciation, and refers more to open works that desire to communicate through images and be publicly appreciated. Many street artists are now being commissioned to transform bare walls into canvases upon which they are free to express themselves and materialize their visions. Apparently lots of the buildings in the San Lorenzo area are vacant due to hazardous conditions or were protected from city seizure through occupations and then transformed into underground social spaces (centro sociale). Many of these offer cheap spaces for various artists to come in and produce artwork and decorate the abandoned walls, or hold makeshift exhibits and gallery shows. While street art is now becoming commercialized, many artists still believe the purest form and the most comfort is found on regular city streets.

We began really looking at some of the specific artwork with a piece by Sten and Lex (I can't believe I forgot I had my camera and failed to take a photo of it) and she described their technique with laying paper and painting over it so as the paper peels off over time the artwork transforms, which I thought was very innovative. We then moved down the street to a grungy looking building and stopped. I looked at the wall and didn't really see anything and was wondering why we were there in the middle of the parking lot, and noticed a faint outline of a bird coming out of the caged window, but nothing else... until some clouds covered the sun and the next thing I know I open my eyes after blinking and see figures emerging from the wall. It was phenomenal; almost like magic when this image revealed itself so clearly after I had wrongly determined that this was a blank wall (the camera does a better job of catching the colors than the actual obscurity in the sunlight). Seriously mind-blowing stuff. This piece is by Borondo, a young Spaniard who has put a lot of artwork up in the surrounding streets. He uses colors that really compliment the natural shades in the wall and cleverly utilizes texture and indents to maximize the depth of his images, as some of the crevices make up eye sockets and nose bridges in his image.

The following street corner featured a small Alice original, where a lot of the paint had worn off but the eyes remained, striking through the blue with their pale yellow stare. The use of colors to compliment the canvas, a bright turquoise piece of metal, really demonstrates the amount of detail and thought put into each piece on the street and the mark of a true artist. Down the street we were greeted by a giddy gladiator with a roller and a paint bucket, captioned "When in Rome" by artist Above. This was one of my favorite pieces because not only is it graphic and bold, but it nudges at the humorous view of foreigners and the tongue-in-cheek (mostly illegal... shh...)  profession of putting your mark on a city. We then passed by a wall commissioned by the city and painted by several artists over a weekend festival and then I rediscovered the entire block done by Alice. I really love the flow of the wall and the scenes intermittent with splashes of color and whirling backgrounds. A nice surprise at the end of the street was one of the mosaic tiles by Invader (the second one I've seen in Rome, the first being on the Spanish Steps!). Unfortunately half of it was torn away, but it's an Invader piece nevertheless -- someone I'm actually familiar with thanks to Banksy's documentary. Another street window further down and around the corner featured a wash of white paint with scratches that was unintelligible from up close, but taking a step back revealed the portrait of a man etched into the glass and paint. Borondo's crosshatching work is seriously impressive.

Lastly we ventured down a street filled with serrande (store shutters) covered in various artwork. One of my favorites was one by Unga, who is part of an Israeli street artist crew called Broken Fingaz, that featured a graphic depiction of two faces melting together in a kiss captioned "Mozzarella!" I have to say, it made me chuckle and cringe at the same time, but I realized that that's that street art is supposed to do. It's supposed to make you glance, to look at the city, to take a moment, and think or have a reaction. This realization made me really excited to start delving into the world of street art, especially in Rome, which is emerging as a new hot spot where people like Invader are showing up to put it more prominently on the global street art map. If I could see all of this within four blocks of San Lorenzo, I cannot wait to see what other works I will discover as I research and work with rising street artists in the coming months!