The city of Bologna has more graffiti than any other city in Italy. When I was there last week I noticed just how much writing on the walls there is: as well as graffiti, Bologna’s streets and buildings are covered with a multitude of posters, fliers, banners, and flags…

I was reminded of  Juliet Fleming’s fabulous discussion of Elizabethan wall-writing in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001), where she emphasises that ‘defacement’ can operate ‘as a principle of textual production’, and that graffiti can be understood as something which ‘appears within an intellectual economy that values the utterance of common-places, and tolerates the appearance of writing as a thing among things’ (p. 51).