Un'uccellino fa sempre piacere

This little vintage bird brooch fluttered into my hand in a shop overlooking the Rastro a few months ago in Madrid. I had been in the city for a couple of weeks and was beginning to pick up the scantiest smatterings of Spanish, but it was still a struggle to ask basic things (and then understand the answers), so I was delighted to detect a strong Italian accent in the owner of this bric-a-brac shop; it was such a relief to be able to switch into a language I do speak, albeit imperfectly.

Like most purveyors of vintage goods, this one was crammed with random stuff in all varieties of condition and quality. I was sorely tempted by the above telephone bag - think of the comedic potential! 'Hello, taxi for one, please?' etc. I'm so glad I went with the bird, though: as the shop owner pointed out , 'un'uccellino fa sempre piacere', which might be loosely translated as 'a little bird always goes down well.'

I love his quizzical blue eye, and the alert curves of his wings and crest. I didn't notice when I bought him (and indeed, hadn't noticed till this afternoon) that these clear stones are set in a flower shape. I'm such a sucker for details - check out those little toes clinging to his perch.

Murals

While the vital link between my camera and my laptop wends its way down the country, I thought I'd take a trawl through some photographic backwater. I find the artistic combinations of paint and wall endlessly fascinating, and in my European peregrinations over the past year I have snapped my shutter at more examples of decorated buildings and walls than you could shake a spray can at. Here is the alleyway I used to walk down to get to the State Archives in Genoa, so garlanded with tags that what might have started off as assertions of individualism fused into a single abstract riot of colours.

Genoa has a long tradition of painted buildings, ranging from the exquisite fading frescoes on Palazzo Spinola, one of the villas along the sixteenth-century aristocratic ghetto of Strada Nuova...

... to simpler trompe-l'oeil masonry and window shutters, still common on many houses today. The embellished surfaces of walls and buildings are an integral part of the civic fabric; they are not locked away in a gallery overnight, but are instead engaged in a constant dialogue with the city that moves around them. This holds true whether they are furtively scrawled on a wall, or whether they are officially sanctioned, as I imagine the large-scale murals in La Latina in Madrid are:

- or whether they seem to be making an anti-establishment statement, as in these three examples from Genoa, Madrid and Paris - the first reads 'Is a home a right?', the second something like 'What would the politicians think?', the third 'Does what you can get for free have a price?' (this is by an artist called Miss-Tic, whose work I saw all over Paris).

I find this next one rather mysterious - it says 'I find myself/I am found behind' and is on a crumbling building in a little square off Strada Nuova in Genoa.

I'm not whether this is all one piece or not, but I like the idea that someone has graffiti-ed the graffiti, as well as its Pop Art aesthetic. I found a lot of clever, stylish murals in Paris.

I'm not sure that this final example truly fits in, but I couldn't resist wedging in a little bit of history. It is from the tiny, charming Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz, a former-Mosque-turned-Christian-chapel in Toledo, and appears to show some angels taking the soul of a dead girl (either that or playfully tugging at a table-cloth).

Although some of the stencilled examples above could probably easily and quickly be reproduced elsewhere, I like how art on walls becomes part of both the particular wall that it is on - if it is not removed, the coating suffers the ravages of time and weather along with the surface it coats - and of the life that goes on around it.