Murales del borgo - CVTA Street Fest circuit

On the walls of a half-abandoned medieval borgo in Molise, an email to the street artist Alice Pasquini grew into CVTA Street Fest — a decade of artists painting live across Civitacampomarano. Their works remain on the village walls as a permanent open-air circuit.

Why it matters

Street-art villages now exist across Italy, but this one set the template for art as survival strategy. Civitacampomarano was losing its population and its buildings to landslides; the regional tourism portal describes the festival, directed by artist Alice Pasquini, as created to give value back to the ancient borgo through permanent works painted live on its walls. The official festival site traces the origin to 2014, when Ylenia Carelli, then president of the local Pro Loco named for Vincenzo Cuoco, invited Pasquini to paint the almost uninhabited historic centre; the festival itself launched under her artistic direction ; its official name, CVTA, plays on the village's name in local dialect. The murals stayed after each edition: the circuit is the festival's permanent legacy.

What to notice

The circuit creates a dialogue between painting and place. The works respond to specific walls, doorways and viewpoints of the medieval fabric, and the residents themselves competed to offer artists the most beautiful wall, the most charming corner — a model of community co-production that the festival site describes as the condition of every intervention. Artists worked with the borgo's ruined textures: fractured plaster, blocked doors and landslide scars become part of the imagery rather than defects behind it. The festival's gallery documents the works, which occupy lanes from the castle quarter through the ancient village.

Context and history

In 2014 the Pro Loco sent an email; Pasquini came, painted, and the place stayed with her. The festival site records that the event was born with her as artistic director and that the name CVTA plays on the dialect name of the village, with the explicit aim of fighting the abandonment and degradation of a forgotten Italy through art that colours walls and shared spaces. The regional portal, dating the initiative to the mid-2010s, emphasises its purpose after the landslides that threatened the historic centre: music and gastronomy accompanied the painting, and the works executed live remain permanently on the village walls. A decade on, the festival's organisation has broadened into exhibitions and gallery projects that extend the murals' life beyond the village streets — but the borgo itself, its walls repainted year after year, remains the true canvas.