Rome’s original street artist has left his mark
There is a hundred-meter stretch of Via di Ripetta in Rome – the sliver of sampietrini between the Museo dell’Ara Pacis and the Mausoleo di Augusto — that has been my favorite walk in the entire world since I was eighteen. That’s where I first met and experienced Fausto Delle Chiaie, Rome’s first street artist.
If you’ve walked this stretch, you may or may not have noticed what looked like little piles of collected rubbish resting along the mausoleum’s border wall. You might have chalked it up to Rome’s tourist detritus. You wouldn’t be exactly wrong.
For almost forty years, Fausto Delle Chiaie curated an open-air art show on this very strip – discarded earphones, broken umbrellas, amputated doll legs, lost shoes, arranged and annotated with his own drawings and commentary into a running exhibition of art and satire. Call it arte povera crossed with conceptual art and daily performance, staged in one singular spot in Rome.
The Boxer and the Man in the Trench Coat
Back in the early 1990s, all I noticed was a larger-than-life stick figure drawn on the pavement — a boxer whose head seemed smushed under the cornerstone of the Church of San Rocco. I loved seeing this drawing every time I walked toward the Pantheon. I wondered who made it. Did they constantly retouch it?
On a later walk, I noticed a man in a trench coat — easy to miss, standing quietly in the corner, tending to these small installations, or planted beneath the Res Gestae inscription on Richard Meier’s building. That was Fausto. He’d been there the whole time.
Piazza Augusto Imperatore was Delle Chiaie’s stage. Born in Rome in January 1944, he’d run this open-air museum on his own schedule since 1989, after a few early years experimenting on the Pincio hill. He called his method “infra-azione”: lay the work down in public, walk away, let the city decide what happens next. Rome called it street art, and his was the city’s original street artist.
Over the decades in Rome, I walked here every week, documenting how pieces changed, evolved, or disappeared from the show entirely, and I got just as fascinated watching him watch his visitors — lingering at the edge of his own museum, half guard, half audience, with a glint in his eye. After a few years of silently participating in the performance, I finally got up the courage to talk to him. With each visit he told me a little more: how he showed up every day, traveling in from outside Rome, always after 2 p.m., trolley case, umbrella, and jacket in tow, rain, shine, or cold.
The Unlikely Origin Story
The backstory is stranger than the art. According to Giuseppe Casetti, owner of gallery Museo del Louvre in Rome, Fausto’s origin story was anything but a straight line from art school. He started as a croupier on cruise ships, then a magician and entertainer at holiday resorts, in essence, a professional charmer of strangers, long before he became a professional charmer with art.
“The synthesis of Fausto” as an artist and a person, Giuseppe told me, is that during an opening of a show for Fausto at the Ara Pacis where critics, journalists, the culture councillor all in attendance, Fausto walked in, took off his shoe, shook out a pebble, set it on the floor, and wrote on a scrap of paper: “I took a pebble out of my shoe.” In one act, Fausto satirized the whole apparatus of museums and critics while being honoured for his work, and made it look effortless.
He Was Funny, and So Was the Art
Each time we chatted, he gave me a drawing. That was part of the years-long performance too — an art transaction, or something like it. He was funny, and the art was funny with him: satire built from trash and stone and cardboard, jokes that took themselves exactly as seriously as he wanted, or not. There’s a 2010 documentary about him literally called Robaccia Rubbish. He got the joke.
Over more than thirty years of watching, I noticed the small changes: the Italian commentary that accompanied each piece went trilingual, sometimes adding English and German, sometimes Chinese or Japanese, depending on what Fausto decided was trendy. He started dating his work, which I think was both tongue-in-cheek and a celebration of the tenacity and duration of his life-long performance. But more than anything, serendipity was still his real material.
What’s Left
He passed away this July 4th, at eighty-two. His presence on Via di Ripetta had already grown scarce these last few years, in fact, I hadn’t seen him this past year at all, and I keep circling back to that gap, not guilt exactly, just the ordinary regret of assuming someone would always be there.
He’d talked to me, over the years, about the hardship – how he got by on donations from friends and strangers while giving his own work away for free. But Giuseppe told me that in July 2023 that the government finally granted him Legge Bacchelli pension, the state fund for distinguished citizens in economic difficulty.
Fausto won’t be on that stretch of Via di Ripetta anymore. I have the memories, the photos and a few drawings. The real collection is at Museo del Louvre where Giuseppe is more than happy to talk art with you.
