I was contacted recently by Alberto Boido, an Italian graffiti aficionado who recently launched the great online project ‘Old Walls’ documenting the life of walls in Milan the 90s, and comparing them to the current incarnations.

As a young boy of 12 in his home town of Milan, he told me how he used to ride his bike around his city looking for the walls on which new and exciting graffiti had started to appear.

Year after year Milan lost the places he loved so much as a child. Each being replaced by glass buildings, abandoned desolate areas or dull grey walls.

Inspired by the changing cityscape, Alberto has begun to ride his bike back to the places he visited regularly, taking photographs of these walls from exactly the same angle as his original photos back in the ’90s.

I really like this blog – there’s something about the walls and places he visited as a child and as an adult, and imagining the layers of paint over the past decades that had accumulated. In some cases the original artwork remains, which is absolutely astounding given the length of time elapsed.

The changes are pretty interesting too, capturing the graffiti of the day and seeing how the style, and street art generally has evolved from being a past time demonised in the 90s to openly celebrated, at least in some places, in the 2000s.

UKB