For years, Ciro Maiello kept the window of his apartment in Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli tightly shut. Not because of the noise, nor the narrowness of the streets below, but because when he opened it, it opened directly onto Diego Armando Maradona’s face. On the night of the 4th of May, when Napoli won their third Scudetto (their first in over 30 years), he finally threw it open, onto a square packed with hundreds of people deliriously celebrating.
The mural has been there since 1990. In the streets of the Quartieri Spagnoli, which do not so much open as relent: narrowing, turning, admitting only strips of sky between the leaning balconies. It was here that a 23-year-old local artist named Mario Filardi had painted Maradona’s portrait onto a wall in Via Emanuele De Deo, shortly after Napoli claimed their second Scudetto. He was funded not by patrons but by neighbours, the mural emerging from within the neighbourhood itself. There was no commission, no permission, no expectation of permanence. And yet the face remained, and the space around it changed. What had been a passage became a pause. People stopped. Looked. Gathered. A window was cut through Maradona’s head so that the family behind it could let in light; out of respect, Maiello kept it closed. The wall did not simply decorate the quartiere, but had become, almost imperceptibly, something people organised their lives around.
This, however, had not always been the case. For years after its creation the mural fell into decay, the square around it submerged in neglect. It was restored in 2016, but it was Maradona’s death in November 2020 that truly transformed it: overnight, the alley became a site of mourning, scarves and candles accumulating at its base as thousands made the pilgrimage to stand before the face. What followed was a broader Neapolitan renaissance: Elena Ferrante’s novels drawing a new literary tourism, monuments restored, the Scudetto returning after 33 years, and the mural became, almost by necessity, its most legible symbol. Indeed, some estimates put the number of visitors in 2023 at about six million people, a figure that would make it the most visited site in Italy after the Colosseum.
Maradona’s face, here, is never only his own. In Naples, he came to embody a reversal, of North and South, of centre and periphery, a figure through whom a city long treated as marginal could occupy the centre of its own narrative. That he was contradictory, excessive, at times self-destructive, only intensified the identification. The image does not idealise him; but absorbs him, as the city does, into something collective. Over time, the wall began to function less as an image than as a point of orientation, a place one arrives at rather than simply passes through. The language used to describe it followed suit: shrine, altar, pilgrimage.
Last October, that centre disappeared. A sheet of blue tarpaulin was pulled across the mural after municipal police raided the surrounding vendors, who had, over the years, settled into the orbit of the wall. In response, they obscured it. For two weeks, Naples’ most visited artwork was a surface that refused to reveal what lay beneath it, the window cut through Maradona’s face left open. The plastic shifted with the wind, catching light differently at different hours, turning the absent image into something almost more present for being withheld.
It is difficult not to think, in this moment, of Banksy, of the peculiar economy of visibility his work depends on, where revelation and concealment are inseparable. But here the logic is inverted. The image is not concealed by the artist but by the community, and it is precisely this inversion that reveals what the wall had quietly become. Visibility becomes not a gesture of authorship, but a form of negotiation; the power to withhold the image is only possible because the wall had long since ceased to be merely decorative and had become, instead, something the neighbourhood depended upon, a point of orientation, a shared reference, a piece of social infrastructure as load-bearing, in its way, as the building it was painted on. The wall does not belong to the one who painted it, but to those who live around it, pass it, use it, and who understood, better than any municipal authority, what its disappearance would cost.
To begin to understand what is at stake in that negotiation, one must leave the centro storico. Twenty minutes east, in Ponticelli, Parco Merola stands with a different kind of visibility. Built hastily after the 1980 earthquake, its concrete surfaces have absorbed decades of neglect. This is not a place that invites arrival. It resists it. And yet, in 2015, images began to appear. The first was Jorit’s portrait of a young Roma girl named Ael, painted deliberately on the site where, years earlier, a Roma camp had been attacked and burned, an act that had hardened local hostility for years. The choice of wall was not incidental. It fixed itself to a point of fracture, as if to insist that the surface could not be separated from what it had already witnessed.
More murals followed, eight in total, each one paired with youth workshops, community conversations, and sustained social presence. Unlike the Maradona shrine, these were never only images. Children who had grown up moving through these spaces were invited to see them differently, not as given, but as something that could be altered, inhabited, claimed. Visitors came later, drawn by scale and reputation. But by then, the murals had already done their quieter work. They had not produced attention: they had redistributed it.
This is the distinction that policy struggles to honour. The Campania Region, which passed a law in 2023 (enacted in 2025) to fund The fragility of this distinction became starkly evident in January 2024, when Jorit’s Dios Umano, a monumental Maradona painted in 2017 onto a condemned building in San Giovanni a Teduccio, was demolished to make way for 360 new housing units. The mural had circulated internationally as an image long since detached from its site. Its loss was mourned accordingly. And yet Jorit’s response was disarmingly restrained: the work, he insisted, had always been intended to shine a spotlight. Once the spotlight had done its work, the wall could go. What endures is not always what remains visible, sometimes it is precisely what the image set in motion once the image itself was gone.
There is, in this, a different understanding of permanence: not as duration, but as effect, one that asks us to seek meaning in the tension rather than trying to resolve it. The murals at Parco Merola will outlast the workshops that animated them, the paint will remain long after the last community gathering has dispersed, and yet their beauty coexists with the implicit understanding of their impermanence. It is the workshops, unfilmable and unlegislatable, that transcend the tangible surface and connect to something more lasting. To preserve the wall is one thing. To preserve what the wall made possible is another entirely.
The city has since approved a redesign of Largo Maradona as a formal public micro-square, lava-stone paving, regulated kiosks, heritage authority approval. Ciro Maiello’s window is still there, cut through Maradona’s face, looking out onto a square that Naples is now learning to govern. What remains uncertain is whether the city, in legislating the wall, understands anything of the man who chose, for years, to keep it shut.
Hello! My name is Paolo, and I am a first-year in the HEC-Bocconi Double Program. As a child, I fell in love with reading thanks to Cressida Cowell’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and never stopped; nowadays, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Kerr, and Donna Tartt are amongst my favourites. My main interests in writing lie in politics and political economics, society, culture, and everything in between. When I am not reading, I am playing football or exploring my newfound cooking skills as a uni student.
