Florence Tackles Duomo Defacement With a New Tool: Virtual Graffiti

FLORENCE, Italy — “Do not write on the walls,” reads the message on a Renaissance stone wall in the cathedral on this city’s central square.

Unfortunately, the instruction, scrawled in black marker, was the defiant graffiti of a visitor who had decided to mock the plastic sign just above it by saying the same thing.

The official missive, on a wall at the end of a steep staircase leading up to the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, better known as the Duomo, had clearly failed in its mission.

Elsewhere, tourists through the decades had defaced walls and other parts of the monument with declarations of eternal love, political slogans, spontaneous feelings and frustrations or other, generally inane, musings.

“I hate the stairs,” read one.

“Cate, I want to marry you,” another proclaimed. Or at least that was the stated desire back in November 1999.

Very recently — Feb. 28 to be precise — “Jackie+Denise,” a couple from New Jersey, decided to make sure the world knew they had visited Florence’s bell tower, designed by one of the pioneer artists of the Renaissance, Giotto di Bondone. They wrote their names in dark red pencil on the 18th-century bronze bell.

For years, officials in Florence have tried to discourage visitors from around the world from using this city’s old stone walls as a time capsule for such musings. But the human urge to generate graffiti, it seems, is a powerful instinct, difficult to tame.

So the officials have decided to try a digital solution to their age-old problem, starting with Giotto’s bell tower, the Campanile.

Having finally cleaned up all the walls along the 414-step climb to the bell tower this year, officials have placed three computer tablets there, hoping visitors will leave their marks, virtually, without damaging the monument itself.

Messages will be stored on a website and archived, for eternity, online.

Any other mark will be removed swiftly, a large billboard at the entrance of the bell tower explains in Italian and English.

“We needed something to act as a deterrent against new graffiti, once all the walls were clean, and we hope that this app will do that,” said Alice Filipponi, the social media strategist at the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the institution that oversees Florence’s Duomo complex.

“Our goal was to let people leave their testimony without smearing the walls again,” Ms. Filipponi said.

It took Beatrice Agostini, the institution architect who manages and maintains the site, three months with a team of nine restoration experts to clean up the walls in the tower using solvent gels and lasers. The task is not one she and her team want to repeat, especially since various parts of the cathedral, where graffiti markings remain, must still be cleaned.

“We want to tell people that a mark is not only an eyesore, but it’s a real damage to the monument,” she said. “Removing the different writings is a problem. On marble it’s almost impossible; a ring stain remains forever.”

She added, “We can’t put cameras everywhere, the space is so narrow, so we thought that providing an alternative was our best bet.”'>>>

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