An Artist who became the mayor of Tirana

He remembers hearing a saxophone for the first time. Saxophones were banned in Albania, which may be why the day a school friend whispered, “Want to see a saxophone?” is as memorable to him as the day he saw his first nude drawings. He says that the sound of that saxophone—a few notes, played in his friend’s attic, with lookouts posted on the stairs—was “like a strange amplification of the miraculous,” and started him wondering “why all these beautiful things were bad.”

Edi Rama returned from a life as a left bank artist in Paris became Mayor of his home town and started to attempt to transform it. One of his first acts was to get coloured paint and cover over the decades of communist concrete. Full article at the New Yorker