Italy has argued about public art for six hundred years, and it still does. The frescoes that fill its churches were themselves commissioned wall painting, made to be read by people walking past, and the contemporary version inherits both the technique and the arguments — about who pays, what it says, and whether it should be preserved.

Turin is the clearest place to see the modern version. Piedmont's capital was Italy's first, then its car city, and the Fiat works at Lingotto and Mirafiori shaped a grid of workers' districts that now hold most of the city's murals. Barriera di Milano and Aurora are where the commissioned programmes have concentrated. It is a colder, more rational, more French city than the Italian stereotype, with arcaded streets built for walking in weather.

The south does something different. The borghi dipinti — painted villages — have used murals since the 1960s to keep hill towns from emptying out, covering whole facades with work that is closer to community storytelling than to gallery-adjacent muralism. Sardinia's Orgosolo is the best known and the most political.

The train network is fast between the northern cities and slower as you go south, which is roughly the shape of the art too.