Authors From Italy

"Your voice, your perfume, a sinking heart. (quoted in Corriere della Sera, October 22, C.E.2009)"

"His fragile security melts immediately, like an ice cream at the seaside on August 15th in the hands of someone who has decided to go on a diet. (from Sorry but I want to marry you, Rizzoli)"

"Your kiss smells like a stormy ocean. (quoted in Corriere della Sera, 22 October 2009)"

"You and I, elevated to love. (quoted in A kiss by Moccia)"

"You and me, like beautiful stars, 30 thousand meters above the sky (quoted in Corriere della Sera, October 22, C.E.2009)"

"And there are gestures, small ones, or rather the smaller the better, after which nothing is the same as before. Immediate gestures, which you don't expect, without which nothing would begin. Gestures without a why but they create many of them. (from Desperately Seeking Niki)"

"We light up with love and beautiful stars remain watching. (quoted in Corriere della Sera, October 22, C.E.2009)"

"Sometimes it is difficult to understand a person, even if you know them well. And if she's a girl, it's really difficult. If you only saw that girl for five minutes, then it's really impossible. (from Desperately Seeking Niki, Rizzoli)"

"But as long as I sing I have you in front of me, the years are just moments, you have always been here in front of me. (from I miss you)"

"In this song we talk about universal love, for all things and for creation."

"Words are things in constant dramatic transformation and a mirror of our struggle in search of light."

"Words are not breath, evanescence, convention. Words are "things". Nothing exists if it has no name, because we are the ones who make the world exist."

"The Italian of the past runs the risk of becoming an aesthetic object that quickly runs out when approaching reality."

"All this sea of ​​song of art needs not only the spectacular moment (stage, exhibition, reproduction) but also codification, interpretation, exegetical insertion into culture."

"The Italian, will soon be the most beautiful of the dead languages."

"I wouldn't write Samarkand today. I don't believe in destiny at all, I believe in human will and freedom."

"[On Fabrizio De André] This is the point: he was the only poet of songwriting. The others, myself included, with the exception perhaps of Guccini, are good, not poets. And his lyrics are the only ones that hold up even without music. [...] It is absolutely not for everyone. His was a cultural elitism. He had the body and mind of a poet. He didn't need to put himself in an ivory tower: he was born in that tower."

"It is never possible that the most beautiful nature in the world is left to chance and culture, the highest intelligence in the world dissolves into laziness, lack of respect for others, disorder, despondency: a culture as immense as that Sicilian deserves a civilization that is on its equals. And here's the point: Sicily is a shitty island if it doesn't rebel. Not Sicily is an island of shit. He is if he doesn't rebel. From this profession of love the media have extrapolated only the most squalid point of hatred."

"Many are born poor, many are beautiful, strong, loyal; few (and yet there are) know how to create the field themselves and then score, but only he, Adriano, is a force of nature, "that" force of nature."

"The Inter is spirituality, it is a way of living, of being. An extraordinary historical adventure: defeats, Pyrrhic victories, randomness, it's always a village Saturday. The Inter player is genetically programmed to defeat, we don't know how to manage victory."

"[On the phrases pronounced a few days earlier on Sicily] Mine were not phrases said with hatred, they did not contain any feeling of racism, I spoke out of love: things must be said , there is no point in hiding behind alibis, behind an amazing sea. Here there really is intelligence, culture and beauty at the highest levels, but as soon as I got off the plane I found myself trapped in infernal traffic, in incredible chaos. I felt anger."

"I will seek my son Arrigo in the afterdeath life."

"The bookseller read the words without imposing them on listening, because the words are not born, were not born in that author, to favor, capture, indulge, maneuver the emotions of the public at will, cramming them into the cage of a single feel. The bookseller returned the words to themselves. (from The bookseller of Selinunte)"

"The musical group is Yorum. It doesn't matter if they were good or not. They were singing a type of civil protest whose tones weren't even that bright, because if they had exaggerated, there in Turkey, perhaps they would have died sooner. They sang words that we are used to hearing from De Gregori, Guccini, even Celentano. They talked about dreams and the desire to live together, they talked about equality, brotherhood, stuff that with the exception of CasaPound, even our right pretends to believe. […] These three guys went on hunger strike for months and months, because without the soul of the body they couldn't care less. No one from the great West showed up. […] The last, Ibrahim Gökçek, died saying "they had left us only our bodies to fight"."

"I have Sicilian grandparents from Messina. Ten years ago I said to myself: now I'm going to see my Sicily. And I was moved by the sea, Selinunte, the mountain of Segesta, the immense sunny plains, the baroque, the Arabic. I returned to the hotel in the evening and squinted with emotion. And then I went down to the beaches and saw them degraded by dilapidated hotels, tourism that didn't have the slightest idea of ​​those natural paradises."

"And perhaps I dreamed that all humanity resembled Sicily. As an old romantic, deluded professor of ancient Greek, but life is not like that today. Life is that if you say shit that means I love you, they don't understand you and above all the pusillanimous ones and the mafiosi don't understand you."

"Of Caparezza you must always grasp the stringent absurdities that he says... some expressions that perhaps you cannot immediately understand what they mean, but of an almost enigmatic beauty, as if they were riddles at times... words you're standing there thinking but what is Caparezza saying? And then you realize that in the context it is linear, it is perfect."

"Do you think I'm just here to fiddle? Absolutely no. I arrive from the airport, I enter the city and there are practically 400 people out of 200 without helmets and in all places there are three rows of cars in the middle of the road and it is difficult to pass. This means that you have not understood what the meaning of existence with others is. You don't know, you don't know. There's no point in hiding behind the fact that you have the most beautiful sea in the world. That's not enough, you're an island of shit. I don't love Sicily which ruins its intelligence and its culture, which when I go to see Selinunte, Segesta there is no one there. I don't love this Sicily that is thrown away.From the meeting Merchants of light. Narrating the beauty between fathers and children; quoted in Salvo Intravaia, Vecchioni: Sicily "island of shit". The mayor of Palermo: "he is right" , Repubblica.it , 3 December 2015. </ Ref>"

"There are normalities, rules, harmonies that you don't even notice, it's obvious that they are there. [...] It is the exception, the upheaval of the usual that makes you anxious, gets on your nerves, unravels your soul. (from The bookseller of Selinunte, Einaudi, Turin, 2004)"

"I know mature women, with multiple degrees, who take continuous injections of botulinum. Another own goal. The more society wants us to be young and desirable, the more we acclimatise to a market demand where looking our best is a guarantee of "being loved". What a mistake... But I put a lot of trust in male intelligence, the kind that chooses companions of the same age, that prefers personality (charm) to a smoothness (whether fake or authentic) without character. In ancient times, streets were called "wrinkles". Isn't it wonderful? In this image there is all the crossing, the transit, of those who have walked, generation after generation, on the earth. And the sweetness of growing old like the alleys and stones of a city that has seen a lot..."

"women are not afraid to admit their weaknesses: we always play with our cards exposed."

"My approach to the noir genre is always existential, I carry out investigations into feelings. For this reason I am also addressing readers who do not like detective stories in the strict sense, because blood is not abundant in my books, and the mere conflict between good and evil, crime and solving the crime, do not interest me. I prefer to move between the shadows, the chiaroscuro, talk about anxieties, observe society through what I call "a cold reflection on feelings". But in the end, beyond genres, all books should tell a mystery, investigate what Dostoevsky called "the mystery man". And the greatest mystery is love [...]."

"Roberto Vecchioni, Scacco a Dio, Einaudi, Turin, C.E.2009. ISBN 978-88-06-19849-7"

"Roberto Vecchioni, The Song of the Theater Song. Notes on the specificity of a language; in Gaber, Giorgio, il Signor G. Told by intellectuals, friends, artists, edited by Andrea Pedrinelli, Kowalski, Milan, C.E.2008, pp. 207-210. ISBN 978-88-7496-754-4"

"Roberto Vecchioni, The bookseller of Selinunte, Einaudi, Turin, C.E.2004. ISBN 88-06-16739-1"

"Angelo Branduardi"

"But this is how desperation is, like a prayer without an addressee."

"I am a man: there is nothing else, neither the journey nor the meetings count, the storm and the sun do not count, the days, the hours do not count; the meaning of things doesn't even matter, whether it shines or goes out. I am a man and that's it: beyond and beyond, with or without all this."

"I thought: it's like when you meet a person and their eyes, arm, shoulders, feet, hair are no longer there; those things are not the person, not even put all together: the person is something else."

"[...] beauty is this dress that you feel sewn on, soft, warm, indestructible, among many others that always lack something."

"The wonder of memory was nothing compared to what was happening in my mind and soul."

"It wasn't just to stay indoors, shelter from the rain: there must have been in them the absolute certainty of being more than the passing day, beyond the years and beyond time."

"Nothing moves, neither here nor there, nor within me. And it is in those moments that I realize it: nothing lives so intensely as time stands still; because it is not the people running, the objects falling, the voices resounding, that make life: those are inexact imitations of life."

"In an instant, and don't ask me why, I saw all the evil, all the hypocrisy of the world winning with impunity, crushing beauty, truth and... and I was moved."

"It seems impossible to you men, because you cannot read inside it. But we don't have yesterday and tomorrow, we only have the moment that remains and doesn't pass, what has been doesn't count, what will be doesn't exist: every fragment, every day is a part of itself: every day of joy is like eternal and that is our secret. It seems impossible to you men, because you don't know happiness. (horse towards men)"

"If we are armed and trained, we are able to convince men that we too have hands, feet and a heart like theirs and that even if we are delicate and tender, there are delicate men who can be strong and vulgar and violent men who they are cowards. Women have not yet understood that they should behave like this, in this way they would be able to fight to the death and to demonstrate that this is true, I will be the first to act, setting myself up as a model. (Veronica Franco)"

"It was like apologizing, to you, but also to me."

"I don't cry, I don't know how to cry, I never learned to do it. I don't know emotion, only regret and yearning: I know annoyance and boredom, absence and rejection. I have a lump in my throat, here, now, but I don't even try to shed tears, because if I had to do it once I wouldn't stop for all the days I have left."

"You write because you don't live: it is an excuse, a defense, a surrender."

"Away, away, other roads, other seas, a different sky of unknown stars: so that even the stars do not know me, do not know who I am."