What is the Italian word for 'scratched drawing', a wall art form?

Graffiti, from graffiare, to scratch - and it is plural. One is a graffito, which nobody says. The word entered archaeology before it entered street culture: it described the scratched inscriptions found on Roman walls, particularly at Pompeii.

Those Pompeian graffiti are the reason the word matters historically. Thousands survive, and they are almost entirely ordinary - election slogans, insults, prices, declarations of love, complaints about the wine, and a great deal of obscenity. One reads that the wall is amazed it has not collapsed under the weight of so much rubbish written on it, which is the oldest recorded complaint about graffiti and is itself graffiti.

They are also one of the few direct voices of ordinary Romans anyone has. Everything else surviving from the period was written by the literate elite; the scratches on the walls were made by shopkeepers, gladiators, prostitutes, slaves and children, and they are the closest thing to overhearing the street. Modern spray-can graffiti has spent fifty years arguing about whether it is vandalism or art, and the honest answer from Pompeii is that the distinction was not available then either.