Geo Quiz

Ancient Mediterranean City

Today’s Geo Quiz is taking us to an ancient Mediterranean City. This city is crammed with magnificent monuments, many of them over a thousand years old.

But we won’t tell you which ones they are… that would be too easy. So let’s just say that the city boasts spectacular fountains, churches, palaces, squares, great historical ruins and a large open-air arena.

Thing is, many of the city’s old walls are soiled with graffiti. But one American expatriate has made it her mission to get people to clean up those beautiful walls with steel brushes.

And to rest after the cleaning effort, it won’t be difficult to find a laid-back café for a cup of rich espresso.

So, you know where we are… don’t you? In any case, the answer is coming up…

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The name of the Mediterranean city we were looking for is Rome, Italy. There are many spectacular sights in Italy’s capital. But many of them have been covered in graffiti over the years. The city is now declaring war. Last week, Rome passed a new law penalizing anyone caught spray-painting city walls – or selling paint cans to minors. The fine is more than $1300. But big fines and threats in other Italian cities have done little to curb the practice. That’s why one fed-up American and a small group of students are taking another approach. Megan Williams has this report from Rome.

Graffiti is as old as Rome itself. In fact, the word comes from the Italian verb “graffiare” — to scratch. That’s how the ancient Romans left their street-level marks. In today’s Rome, ubiquitous seems hardly adequate a word to describe graffiti. A jumble of tags, scribbles, and phallic symbols runs along almost every building in the city. Including churches — like the one less than a block away from Rebecca Spitzmiller’s apartment in downtown Rome.

Now the church’s travertine facade is starting to revert back to its original color — white. It doesn’t quite sparkle. But thanks to the efforts of Spitzmiller and a group of teenagers, the black spray-painted scribbles that have been covering most of it for the past decade have almost faded away.

18-year-old Virginia Vitalone is part of the crew that’s scrubbing the church’s outer walls with oven cleaner and steel brushes. Most of the graffiti around Rome is tagging — the signatures of Roman teenagers. Vitalone says she recognizes some of the marks she’s cleaning up as the signatures of friends. Vitalone says as a Roman, she’d accepted all the graffiti as just part of urban life. That is until Spitzmiller asked her to join the group to remove the scribbles and scrawls.

Vitalone: “It was normal for me to see all the graffiti. There’s so much in Rome, that I just thought the way the city is, but I now I know it can be better, cleaner, so…”

Rebecca Spitzmiller, a law professor at a local university, says the root of Rome’s graffiti problem is a lack of civic culture. The attitude that outdoor public space doesn’t belong to everyone, but instead is a kind of no man’s land. It’s not just graffiti that conveys the attitude. Roman streets are covered with litter and doggy doo, as well. Spitzmiller says passivity cloaked as tolerance means nothing gets done about it. She points across the street to make her point.

Spitzmiller: “I remember when that nipple… I point out that that was in 1985 so not as if anyone cares about these buildings.”

Spitzmiller is taking her message to schools throughout Rome. As an American who’s lived and worked here for 25 years – and raised an Italian son – she insists she’s not trying to impose foreign values, but pass on community initiative.

Spitzmiller: “I’m not trying to say it’s our way of viewing the world. Everyone agrees this is the thing to do. It’s just that as an American I think we have it more engrained in us the do-it-yourself attitude.”

Garibaldi: “This kind of service goes to roots of teaching community feeling. Americans have got a lot to teach us.”

That’s Anita Garibaldi — the great-granddaughter of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the national hero who helped unify Italy a century and a half ago. Her Garibaldi Foundation supports projects that foster community spirit — like Spitzmiller’s anti-graffiti initiative.

The reward for Rebecca Spitzmiller and her teenage crew is in the work itself. After two hours of scrubbing, that long stretch of church wall that for years was a blackened jumble of illegible tags now glows in the late afternoon sun.

And so do these Roman kids — as they belt out an old standard about Rome’s beauty — with a bit of new-found community pride.

For the World, I’m Megan Williams in Rome.