Half a million rubber balls down the Spanish steps in Rome

Decio sez, "Some pranksters (caught afterwards by police) threw a half million balls down the Spanish Steps by Holy Trinity in Rome. Like the Bravia commercial, but for real."

Half a million, huh? Who says cheap manufactured goods are bad for society? Link (Thanks, Decio!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Bevatron Repairman

Sort of what I imagine the jelly bean scene was like in H. Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man”
Steven

and by, “like the bravia ad,” you surely mean, “like the 1997 piece by canadian artist lucy pullen.”
dainel

To all those who complain about “cleaning up after”, please look at the video. Did you notice the people walking by who pick up a few balls and put it in the bags they were carrying?

Those balls are new. I’d go clean up myself, for free, if Rome weren’t so far away. After I “clean up”, I’ll sell those balls. Those balls will probably get picked up within a day or two.
insomma

I’m surprised with all of this talk of litter.

It’s Italy- Is Naples not in the headlines back in the States?
Carl Rigney

The link says it was a quarter-million, which is still enough to fill 2200 square feet 2 feet deep according to this handy ball fill calculator.

Now for “The Running of the Balls”, in which people start out running ahead of them, in a fun hybrid of xkcd and Pamplona. That might be even more fun with superballs than playpit balls.

As someone once scribbled on a whiteboard at the MIT Media Lab, “Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer.”
Nick CT

Re: Ken Hansen #18

Mardi Gras is a massive mess every year with beads and beer bottles and etc everywhere, but it is okay because it is a celebration? And this is not okay because it is done in protest?
Misciel

What the post and the comments miss is really the *true* irony of this so-called prank.

Apparently, the “artistic activist” Graziano Cecchini – who’s been called an “extreme-right sympathiser” – launched them as a protest against the appalling garbage collection crisis that’s been going on full-blown in Naples for at least six months, if not longer. The irony is of course that I’m supposing the balls then had to be cleaned up by municipal sanitation engineers. Nice… How’s that for advocating better allocation of sanitation resources?!

But fear not… it seems that not all of the balls have hit the wastestream. At least some are actually available for sale on Italian eBay. (Just like you can buy a bottle of Cecchini’s earlier “prank,” the Trevi Fountain dyed red, in the U.S. for a mere 99 cents with $35 for shipping!) For the more budget-minded, however, “replica” Spanish-Step balls are already available on American eBay starting at just 99 cents! So, I guess it’s not just “art” or “protest” or even “litter”… it’s also a “bargain”! *GAK!*
jwb

The Bravia commercial _was_ for real.
obdan

Art is a ball?
stubar

@10

That’d be quite a voyage for them to make it all the way to the Tiber. Topography aside, the distance alone is significant, not to mention making it over the retaining walls that line most of the river’s banks. As for the act itself, I say bravo to anything that makes the Spanish Steps as interesting as tourists seem to think they are, especially considering that the Trinita dei Monti is apparently STILL covered in scaffolding.
Greatmiddlewest

Pretty sure those balls aren’t rubber. They look more like the hard plastic kind commonly found in ‘ball crawl’ pits.
CitrusFreak12

Came here to say exactly what #3 said. They aren’t rubber, they’re plastic.
Takuan

please, please tell me they had more than one camera set up
spazzm

Littering is now sexy and praise-worthy!
Marrz

Yah I was going to comment that the Bravia is real too
Nick CT

Ken Hansen

Is Mardi Gras okay in your book? That was a giant mess after the party long before Youtube.
Antinous

@#2,

I’m not even into women, but I’d be tickled pink to see a pole dance on a subway. And why is everybody assuming that they weren’t planning on cleaning it up? Now, if they had used packing peanuts…
Joe

Those balls float. A lot of them will wind up in the Tiber, and flow out to the Mediterranean, where they will join the thousands of tons of floating plastic trash already present. And that pales compared to the vast quantities of trash in the Pacific.

Please don’t glorify this kind of thing.
Cefeida

I’m with #2. This is cute, but thoughtless.
padrevic

It was a protest. See here
g.park

@ Ken Hansen-

Agreed, citizen! All dissent should be neatly typed and delivered in triplicate to the appropriate authorities! And all art must be contained in private residences and museums- we can’t have it out in public where it might encourage thinking or feeling!
ryandestroys

What 12 said. I’m surprised it took that long for someone to mention this. The act was protest. Each ball was to represent a lie told by politicians to the Italian people.
jennee

I do think they should clean up after themselves (or hire someone to do that, or pay for it), but come on, it’s FUN!
Infinite Decay

@10 Joe: Although I agree that plastic waste can be a problem, that cleanup crew in the video was hard at work before the balls had even come to rest at the bottom of the steps. I’d would think that they would be able to corral them all before they roll all the way to the Tiber.

@2 Ken Hansen: There’s a world of difference between a colorful stunt like this and beating “the snot out of a stranger”. Comparing the two is ridiculous.

Anyway, anybody know how much half a million plastic balls would cost? I’d always love to do something like this. (xkcd)
mokey

man, you guys are bummers. looked pretty fun to me. yay for public mischief!
ripplepoppy

I have wanted to do this since I was a little kid. I even had a bucket o’ bouncy balls saved up to let loose on a big hill in my town. But who knew that some bouncy balls get kinda dried out after 20 years?
It made me truly happy that somewhere in the world my dream was realized.
This is !so! cool. ::impish grin::