It comes to an end with It’s spreading everywhere by Vanni Santoni, published by Laterza, the journey through the five finalist works of the Campiello Prize 2024: for a third it is a short novel, for two thirds an interesting retrospective on the evolution of street art, graffiti and writing in urban contexts over the decades. Until its arrival in museums and the (criticized) monetization, direct or indirect.

Santoni’s research is meticulous and starts from a question: how far back in time do we have to travel to tell the story of the birth of graffiti? “To the caves of Lascaux, to the engravings on the walls of Pompeii, or to the viral drawings left by American soldiers during the war?”, asks the author. But ultimately finding an answer to a question that probably has no solution is not the goal of the 125 pages of It’s spreading everywhererather oriented towards a detailed analysis – however partial (but it would not be possible otherwise) – of the phenomenon born in the early seventies of the last century, when the kids of the poorest neighborhoods began to tag streets and walls of Philadelphia and New York. A phenomenon that – as the title itself says – is rapidly spreading everywhere, in the States but also in Europe, and is finding fertile ground also in Italy, where it is taking root in particular in student and protest environments.

Campiello Prize 2024: the finalists

Santoni chooses to tell the story of the evolution of street art, starting from the first tags and lettering, through Cristiana and her friends and contacts in the ‘underground’ circles. The protagonist of his short novel is still searching for her dimension in the art world, despite her no longer young age, and a never forgotten past – to which she still appears very attached – in the ‘sticker bombing’ panorama. Years after having closed the spray can in the locker for the last time, she feels the need to rediscover, at least once, the bond with disobedient art.

Sweatshirt and hoodie on his head, spray cans, night expeditions in search of regional trains to graffiti: by superimposing the narrative and the essayistic level, Santoni gives life to a small popular work on street art, reeling off a long series of (for many unlikely) names, street art techniques, cities around the world where artistic disobedience has been perceived and welcomed with even diametrically opposed methods. In the pages of Santoni’s latest work there is a half-criticism of the commodification of an art born as a form of expression and protest (especially if the economic return is six figures), and there is ample space for those artists who protest against the removal of graffiti by the ‘powerful’ to insert them in this or that temporary exhibition, charging a ticket. A famous case is that of Blu, one of the ten best street artists in the world, who in 2016 chose to erase some of his works from the walls of Bologna, as a form of protest against the recovery and privatization of an art form born to be subject to the deterioration of time.

There is no hiding: find It’s spreading everywhere among the five novels that will compete for the ‘vera da pozzo’ on September 21st, it is a bit surprising, and not because it lacks value: on the contrary, the work behind it, despite the brevity of the work, seems truly monstrous already at the level of documentation and study of the sources. We are simply faced with a non-canonical literary work, but which, if we look closely, fits perfectly into the history of Italian narrative of the last twenty years, which has lost its aura of canonicity in favor of experimentation and mixing. Santoni’s courageous choices (to be rewarded) are first and foremost the hybridism between novel and essay style. The widespread use of explanatory photos to support the narration, functional and not casual. The second person singular.

It’s spreading everywhere Will it win the 2024 Campiello Prize? Probably not, but it will certainly be remembered for its experimental nature.