Street art in Florence: Fabio Petani's mural decorates new public restroom

The metal walls of the new public bathroom installed in May last year in Florence’s Piazza dell’Isolotto have become an explosion of colors, plants and flowers. This is thanks to Erbario Figurato, a mural intervention created by Piedmontese artist Fabio Petani (Pinerolo 1987).

The project, curated and promoted by Street Levels Gallery, Florence’s gallery dedicated to urban art, in collaboration with the City of Florence, from today, Feb. 7, will permanently fix flowers and plants on the building’s exterior surfaces juxtaposed by careful nomenclature, in line with the plant-themed odonymy that characterizes the Isolotto area.

The entireneighborhood has the peculiarity of having streets and squares dedicated to plant and tree names, symbolic of the background that preceded the progressive architectural development and population growth of the area. Via degli Agrifogli, Via dei Rododendri, Via delle Mimose, and Lungarno dei Pioppi, to give just a few examples, recall the area’s rural past, which, like the ancient villages in the vicinity, once housed rural houses, and only developed in the early nineteenth century due to the establishment of industries - now all closed - of majolica, foundries, and workshops. In the 1920s these areas expanded and housing was built for the working classes, although Isolotto as it is today was not built until after World War II.

It is therefore no coincidence that the conception and execution of the work was entrusted precisely to Fabio Petani, an urban artist with a strong interest in the contamination of art and botanical studies. His site-specific works, which stand out on the architecture of major European and non-European cities, are characterized by his constant search for consistency with the territory of intervention and, at the same time, by his acute sensitivity to the herbal universe and to environmental issues.

“The topos of this intervention,” they explain at Street Levels Gallery, “is fully reunited with the identity of the artist, so sensitive to the botanical, chemical and alchemical universe and so capable of translating its charm and purity.”

Street art in Florence: Fabio Petani's mural decorates new public restroom

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