The city is loud. Cars honk, voices rise and fall, and the faint rhythm of street musicians drifts through the air. But Francesca’s focus is elsewhere. She’s not looking at the crowd or the storefronts - she’s scanning the walls, lampposts, and alleys.
A sticker catches her eye, slapped haphazardly onto a street sign. It reads, “Las parades no se callan, lo que vos sí (The walls don't shut up, you do).” Francesca pauses, tilts her head, and takes a photo.
“There is so much anger on these walls,” she says to herself, her voice almost lost in the hum of the city. “and I can feel it all.”
Following the Layers
Francesca walks on, the soles of her shoes scuffing the pavement. The wall ahead is a riot of color: graffiti scrawled over older murals, faded posters and stickers peeling under fresh layers of wheatpaste. She traces the edge of one sticker with her finger. It says, “You can‘t kill us, we‘re already dead.”
She thinks about the layers of paint and glue - each one a voice, a message left behind. She pulls out her notebook and writes: “Who is the person behind this sticker? What motivated them to create it? What story are they trying to tell us?”
Her camera clicks.
The Message in the Chaos
A few blocks away, Francesca turns down an alley. It’s way quieter here. The sun is slowly setting, with the last rays of sun filtering through, illuminating a graffiti stretched across an entire wall. Nobody in the street seems to care. Everyone has read these words before: „Si el hambre es ley, el saqueo es justicia“ (If hunger is law, looting is justice).
Francesca steps back, taking it in. It’s not just black spray on a wall - it’s anger, grief, and hope, all in one. She can feel it, the raw emotion pouring out.
„Why do these pieces move me so much?” she murmurs, almost to herself. „Because they’re not asking for permission to exist. They’re demanding to be seen.”
The Doubt
As the sun sets, Francesca flips through her photos on the subway ride home. Each image feels powerful, but something nags at her. „How can I possibly tell all these stories?” she wonders. “What if I don’t do them justice?“
She scrolls to the sticker from earlier: „Ceasefire now“, „Trans Rights are Human Rights“. The words seem to hit her differently now; they seem to have a purpose.
„Maybe it’s not about telling every story,“ she thinks. “Maybe it’s about showing how these voices connect, how they make people stop and think.”
The next morning, Francesca returns to the streets with fresh determination. This time, she moves slower, letting the city guide her. Every sticker, every mural, every layer of paint is part of a larger conversation.
She notices a new mural: „Somos el sol que renace ante la impunidad“ (We are the sun that is reborn in the face of impunity). Francesca finds herself smiling, snapping another photo.
„These walls speak for all of us,” she thinks. „And maybe my role is just to help others hear them.”
Later, Francesca organizes her photos into themes: Hope. Identity. Resistance. She prints them out and hangs them on her room’s wall. There is it, a small art gallery, pairing each image with a reflection or story she’s uncovered. Her favorite? The one capturing all the stickers and the posters on Naples’ wall. Beneath the image of all those women’s faces, she writes. „Si sul putess’ parlá per tutt e femmen’ ro munno” (If only I could speak for all the women in the world).
As she does that, she feels a quite sense of purpose.
Francesca is back in the city, walking its noisy, chaotic streets. But now, she sees them differently. Every sticker and graffiti isn’t just art - it’s a voice, speaking to anyone who will listen.
She stops in front of a new mural, camera in hand. „The streets will never stop speaking,“ she thinks. „And well… neither will I.“