Conceptual art of questionable taste unveiled during reopening of Colosseum toilets.

After a damning report earlier this year revealed there was only one public toilet functioning in all of Rome, the city council decided to revive seven bathrooms in the centre.
However rather than open them discreetly, the city staged an inauguration at the Colosseum toilets, an event documented in an entertaining article by Helga Marsala in Italy's Artribune. 
The city's environment councillor Pinuccia Montanari published a video of the opening ceremony – rather a cramped affair – during which she tested the facilities, such as the taps.
Bizarrely the city even went so far as to install art in the toilet, ostensibly to enrich the €1 visitor experience. Montanari hailed the lavatory's "really original work of contemporary modern art" by Paolo Albani, the Tuscan writer, performer and visual poet. 
Albani's conceptual piece features the word Successo with the first "C" rubbed out and replaced with a free-falling letter L. 
This play on words, of dubious taste, leaves the art viewer faced with Sul cesso, a vulgar Roman expression whose English equivalent would read “In The Bog”.

Published as part of the monthly Art News column in the April 2018 edition of Wanted in Rome.