Unlike Cambridge, you can find quite a few graffiti on the walls of Pescara. I don't mean those colourful hip-hop murals (although there are a few of those too). I mean those sentences quickly written on a wall with a black spray. They're quite ugly and nine times out of ten they don't say anything particularly interesting.
Most of these graffiti are either obscenities or they're something to do with football. (Which team is the best and which one is shite. Yeah, thanks for sharing that information.) A few have a political content, and as you can imagine the views expressed are usually quite polarized. Either far-right or far-left slogans. A left-wing slogan which I still remember (I saw it in Rome, though, not Pescara) was the following:
Se vedi un punto nero all'orizzonte
Spara a vista
O è un prete o un fascista
If you see a black dot on the horizon
Shoot on sight
It's either a priest or a fascist
And of course, being Pescara, there's the ubiquitous Chieti merda, which you already know about. (See 021 Frogs and ghosts.)
But there was a graffiti near where I lived which stood out for two reasons. First of all, it didn't belong to any of the categories above. It wasn't obscene, and it wasn't about football or politics. But stranger still it was written in English. It quite simply said:
Who killed Bambi?
I would read it when I went out for a walk and it made me wonder: Who wrote that? What does it mean? Why is it written in English? It must've been written by someone in the neighbourhood, and it seemed like a tiny fragment of hermetic poetry. Did Bambi perhaps stand for innocence? Or maybe nature. Was the choice of the English language some sort of critique of America? I didn't obsess over it, but I was intrigued.
And then one day, by pure chance, I found out that it's just the title of a Sex Pistols song. (I don't know what the song is about. I'm not keen on the Sex Pistols. As far as I'm concerned, the Ramones are to the Sex Pistols what a chocolate bar is to a dog turd. They may look similar from a distance but they're very different.)
That realization completely ruined it for me. I wish I had never found out. I was curious for some answers, when in fact the best part was asking the questions.
M.
PS: There was another graffiti near where I lived that caught my attention. It was written in the local dialect:
Li popp' ni è mai tropp'
It means boobs are never too big. So I suppose some of those graffiti do contain a degree of wisdom.
