Through the encrypted skin of the city: The peculiar case of Turin analgrams

The contribution addresses a series of small handwritten papers stuck all over the centre of Turin, Italy, first witnessed in early 2012. The proposed descriptions, analyses, and hermeneutic hypotheses are based on an un-systematized corpus of 300 tokens circa, photographed between 2012 and 2018 (mostly, 2014-2015). The sticky papers are prominently sexually connoted, they are featured with a verbal component, which includes anagrammed parts, and a visual one, consisting in the stylized representation of a penetrated backside, and they are signed by a “S(iffredi) R(occo) T(ano)” (a reference to the most famous Italian porn actor); whence the etic name ‘analgrams‘. By reconnecting to Mafia’s encrypted messages, I call such notes ‘pizzini‘ (lit. “little pieces of paper”, in Sicilian), as well. Scarcely observed by locals and not studied yet to any extent, the phenomenon may be a uniqueness, globally; as a matter of fact, the ‘analgrams‘ hold many different features together (sticking, handwriting, graphomania, sexual content, attitude of protest, anti-religiousness, wordplay, enigmatography), which are usually displayed separately in similar street or outsider art phenomena. The author of the ‘analgrams‘, whose inferable profile emerges as complex and contradictory (being both trivial and learned, as well as pathological and obsessive), testifies an incredible capability of being up-to-date, by following the news and keeping track of them almost on a daily basis, embodying the profile of a perfect, contemporary Pasquino.