The Mayor of Verona, Flavio Tosi, has given up his campaign to keep the Casa di Giulietta [Juliet’s House] supposedly the home of the Capulets in Shakespeare’s most famous love tragedy, free of graffiti.
In 2008 he had the walls completely cleaned of the messages scrawled by lovers or by those whose love had gone unrequited, only to see thousands of new messages appear within days. An initiative to get visitors to send their amorous declarations to the tourist site by email or text failed miserably and one can imagine the Mayor perhaps sighing as he gave in graciously to the inevitable.
Now some of the messages have been immortalised in a series of paintings by Marc Quinn, a conceptual artist who is a member of the Young British Artists Group. During an exhibition of his work at the House in 2009 Quinn placed some large blank canvasses near the door. Visitors wrote graffiti or left notes on them and Quinn used the most interesting of these to create his “Love Paintings” series.
On Monday Quinn returned to Verona to present one of the canvasses to the city. It will hang in the house which inspired it. Quinn says of the graffiti,
“These are the graffiti of dreams and aspirations that show us something about the human heart.”
Have you ever declared your love in a graffito? Where?
