You may recognize the face painted on the side of the Argentinian Tomato Express Supermarket on Osceola Parkway. He’s an Argentine professional footballer.
Captain for both the Major League Soccer club Inter Miami and Argentina’s national team, it’s Lionel Messi.
Why is he on the wall of a supermarket? To represent.
“We are huge fans. We’re from Argentina, and this is actually mom’s idea,” Stella Siracuza, owner of the Tomato Express Supermarket, said.
The market owners, Siracuza, her mom, and their family, say they’re proud to showcase a big role model and an even bigger part of their culture.
“This is a way to show how proud we are of the kind of athlete and the kind of person that he is,” Siracuza said. “We caught up with the painter behind the brush.”
When painter Eli Rivera moved from Colombia, she first started painting murals in Miami. Then, she moved to Orlando to continue painting in stadiums and homes.
The Messi mural, she says, is her very first portrait of that scale. It was a challenge she was excited to take on. And Rivera says it only took her one week to finish the entire mural.
In just more than one week, Messi will be in Central Florida playing Orlando City.”We’re hoping he might come visit and sign our wall!” the shopowner said.
But if not, they say, they’re happy to know he’s much closer now than he was before.
:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/grupoclarin/VJIH2HGWXBF4DAUJXZMQUGK6GI.jpg)
