My Favorite Graffitti

Graffiti is one of the oldest methods of transmitting information through words and/or pictures, and in Rome, something ubiquitous. It is an Italian word, after all. Even Pompeii has graffiti, and Ancient Rome was famous for it. Now, most of the graffiti tells me such important things as 'Flavio is lame' or 'Marco loves Giulia' (you'd be amazed at how much of the graffiti in Rome is declaring love in one way or another), but every once in a while I come across something really spectacular. The below picture represents not only my favorite graffiti in the city of Rome, but also the hard work of someone who might be a kindred soul:


If the text at the bottom of the image is too hard to read, it says:
YOU ARE 8851 STEPS FROM THE AURELIAN WALL
And below, the same in Italian. As you can see, this data is accompanied by a map of the city of Rome with the Aurelian walls marked in red. The red plus signs represent the places where this clever artist posted this graffiti, changing the number of steps at each location.

I am incredibly impressed that someone took the time to figure out how many steps it took to get from the old city walls (built in the 3rd century AD) to the wall on which this was painted. Also, this mysterious tagger somehow got or made a stencil in the shape of Rome, with some of the streets marked out. The photo here I was lucky to find, because the first time I saw this image was on a wall only a few blocks from my apartment. Not having my camera with me at that moment, I resolved to come back later and take the photo. However, when I returned, camera in hand, more graffiti had been sprayed over most of the map, declaring 'Via Induno Libera!' ('Free Via Induno!' From what, I do not know. I think it is a pun on another street in our neighborhood, which is actually called Via Roma Libera [Street of the Free Rome]). I tried to edit the writing out of the map, but my photoshop skills are not that honed. Within a week, both graffiti were painted over and the wall was blank again. I found this one recently on a wall behind the Forum, where I had wandered on an afternoon off from work.