This is the kind of story we love. It’s emotional, powerful, and it makes you stop and think.

I call Joe Ficalora. I’m expecting a technical conversation in English about a project we want to develop in New York. Instead, within minutes, it turns into a wonderful chat in Sicilian, with someone I immediately feel I’ve known forever.

Joe is American. But he’s also deeply Sicilian: he speaks Sicilian, he has a Sicilian heart, and both his mother and father were Sicilian. He’s living proof of how our eclectic spirit, our instinct to welcome, imagine, and reinvent, can shape the world.

Joe is one of those Italian Americans who never lost their roots and ended up shaping both their Brooklyn and their New York.

Let’s take a step back.
His parents were originally from Castellammare del Golfo. Joe was born in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a strong Italian presence, right in the middle of one of the most culturally diverse areas in the world. Brooklyn is home to Italians, Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, Russians, Poles, Irish, Arabs and Middle Eastern communities, Koreans—everyone.

It was a tough, violent environment. When Joe was 11, his father was killed on his way home from work. From that moment on, his relationship with the neighborhood was complicated.
Then, fifteen years ago, his mother—just 61—died of brain cancer. She was a kind, welcoming woman who had worked her entire life with dignity and perseverance. Yet her memory, like his father’s, was overshadowed by the violence and decay of the place they had lived in. Joe felt sadness and bitterness: she didn’t deserve that, just as the many honest Italians who ended up associated with the rough edges of certain American neighborhoods didn’t deserve it.

Then something simple and powerful happens.
Joe walks past the old industrial buildings in the area. One of those gray, silent facades catches his eye. He looks at it and thinks: “This wall could tell a different story.”
That’s the moment something changes.

Joe told us he didn’t want his mother’s life—built on sacrifice and love—to disappear in the general silence of a society that grinds everything up and moves on.
So the first mural is born. It’s an unexpected success. And from that point on, the Bushwick Collective takes shape: a festival that grows year after year thanks to friends, artists from across New York, and eventually from around the world. Today it’s a moment of celebration and community for hundreds of artists and thousands of visitors, and it has turned Bushwick into a year-round destination.

Joe’s rules are simple and clear:
– no content that could offend children, women, or local businesses
– respect for the community
– selection based on talent, not fame.

Artists from all over the world have taken part — just to name a few:
Sef1 (Peru), Huetek (Brooklyn), Tymon de Laat (Netherlands), Ashley Hodder (USA), Enzo (France), Atael McGregor (Denver), Robert Vargas (Los Angeles), Joe Iurato, Sipros (Brazil), Mr. June (Netherlands), Ligama (Italy), Rosk (Italy).

The walls are renewed year after year: murals are temporary, some last a few seasons, others just one. This constant renewal gives the entire area a unique kind of energy. Joe’s guiding belief is powerful: flowers should be given to the living, not only to the dead. And that’s why he envisioned a festival that keeps evolving, never admiring itself in the mirror.

During the festival, the atmosphere feels like a big family gathering: people laugh, paint, play.
In fifteen years, this celebration has transformed Bushwick into one of the most important street art festivals in the world.
Through his work, Joe has literally transformed his neighborhood and has become a symbol—not only for New York.

And here’s the line we should all remember:
Joe’s story shows that roots aren’t nostalgia—they’re a force that can regenerate places, even the ones that seem beyond saving.

Joe is also a symbol for people back in Italy. He proves that our roots can bloom anywhere, and that you can be American and Italian at the same time.
His story is universal: it tells us that even in the darkest corner of the world—the one where your father was murdered when you were a child, the one you believed had no future—if you find the courage to look for color, others will show up to help you. And the color will come.
And you’ll see flowers grow where there were only ruins.

We reached out to Joe because we want to celebrate, in Brooklyn’s symbolic Italian gathering place, the 100th anniversary of Rosa Balistreri’s birth in 2027, with a mural painted by Giulio Rosk.
It’s part of the Roots project, through which we aim to tell the stories of Italians who shaped our history and identity, through murals and artworks around the world.

The phone call inspired us; Joe himself is a perfect ambassador for the Roots project, and the call couldn’t have ended any other way: with a mutual commitment.

To create in Palermo a mural dedicated to Joe Ficalora and his extraordinary Bushwick Collective.