R(h)omecoming | Happy February

Moving to Italy and more cool stuff, in your every-1st-of-the-month newsletter

Giulia Blocal

Feb 01, 2021

Add this address to your inbox... and see you there every 1st of the month!

If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, subscribe here!

If you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to a friend. (Thank you)

Happy February!

I took this picture shortly after I opened this blog:

It was 2012 and I was moving back to Rome Sweet Home.

For the following years, this picture inspired me in wanting to document the evolution of street art and graffiti in my hometown, thus pushing me to explore areas beyond the city center. The thing I love about Rome is that there will always be places I haven’t seen yet; I feel this enthusiasm even now that I’ve just moved back R(H)ome after 2 years and a half living in Amsterdam.

Yes, of course, life will be different in 2021, but I hope I can still explore the streets of Rome and write about what’s happening there. And I promise I will write about Amsterdam, too: I couldn’t properly say goodbye to the city, so I will celebrate it here on the blog, through all the Amsterdam stories I haven’t told you yet.

Until next month,

Giulia

From the Archive

Nico, The Riot Vandals (TRV) and the Golden Age of Graffiti in Rome

When I was 7 years old, the TRV Crew started tagging the walls of Rome. That’s how all this began for me; as an innocent hunt down the rabbit hole of Rome’s earliest graffiti scene. Little did I know that, almost 30 years later, I would once again be walking on TRV’s footsteps by going from Rome to Amsterdam, where I met Nico.

Nico is a founder of TRV, one of the first graffiti crews in Rome. Once he had established the renowned “Roman style” of graffiti writing, organised hip-hop events all around Italy, shot a documentary about graffiti, and curated several exhibitions, Nico moved to Amsterdam along with fellow TRV members Pane and Joe, with whom he was running the graffiti-powered creative agency “Why Style”.

Read the article on the blog

NEW on Spotify!

Our collaborative playlist

Which is to say: if you wanna share your fav songs with fellow readers of this newsletter, you should add them here:

(the ones added by me are suggestions I get via Instagram)

Handpicked by yours truly

Stuff I liked this month

I honestly don’t know how could I have missed The Office, one of the best comedies ever. I’m loving everything about this show, from the hilarious jokes to character development and, now that I have to quarantine, I’m also especially glad that the show lasted for 9 seasons ;)
I visited Utrecht one last time and there I saw one of the ten sculptures that Boris Tellegen (a.k.a. the Dutch graffiti legend DELTA) made for De Stijl Cycle Route. These unique artworks were realised in honour of Mondrian and can be found along a cycle route that goes from Utrecht and Amersfoort. Here is the one I spotted in Utrecht:

This film about a forty-year-old writer who turns to rap:
I’m reading Ted Conover’s book Rolling Nowhere: riding the rails with America’s hoboes;
My current obsession with freights started with Roger Gastman’s book Freight Train Graffiti, which features more than 125 freight train artists and hundreds of never-before-seen photos;
Yet one more link about graffiti: this documentary where famous graffiti writers explain basic graffiti concepts, such as ‘tagging’, ‘fame’, ‘trains’ and ‘consequences’:
Zoom Rooms have been such a great thing in an otherwise awful 2020! I’ve walked into many of them and I’m still catching up with videos that went live last spring. Last month I watched this video of two great comedians (Steve Martin and Jerry Seinfeld) in conversation at The New Yorker festival;
Mural of the month: Julien de Casabianca in Bordeaux (France)
I felt my own yearnings watching Revolutionary Road, a movie from 2008 featuring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet as a 1950s couple discontentedly living a middle-class life;
This documentary about street artist Space Invader and his dream of sending one of his tile mosaic to space:
Last month many of you enjoyed the video about the sounds of Amsterdam, and so I looked on Youtube for something similar about Rome:
I really would like to know what you liked in the past month. Just reply to this email to send me your suggestions ;)

You somehow stumbled upon my blog and subscribed to the newsletter, but you have no idea who I am and how my blogging journey has unfolded so far? Here I share the ups and downs of my first 9 years of blogging :)

Places that have inspired my writing

Top 55 Blocal’s destinations