There is absolutely no doubt that one of the things Italy continues to gift the world is art. The Bel Paese gave us Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Dante, Artemisia, and more recently Modigliani, Boccioni, and Cattelan, to name a few names. But it’s not just indoor art that we should be paying attention to: the Italian street art is just as flourishing, intriguing, astonishing, and incredibly diverse.

Street art as a movement was born in New York City in the 1970s. It took about two decades to arrive in Italy. In the 1980s, it was the Italian art critic Francesca Alinovi who curated the first ever European exhibition of graffiti art in an art institution. The Emilian city of Bologna is considered the cradle of street art in Italy.