Roberto Vecchioni

"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>"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"."

"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)"

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

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Young people must fight for culture."

"I believe that everything that happens in the world, even what seems apparently inexplicable, is a millimeter of God's yardstick."

"I feel God inside me very strongly. I would say that apart from some skirmishes today I am in a good moment with Him."

"I believe that God works behind the scenes, never impeding the freedom of human beings, never forcing anyone to do things against their will."

"faith does not make us waterproof, but it is a good shield, a good help."

"True faith is that which knows doubt, which seeks answers."

"I have studded my life, my publications, my records, with words addressed to God, with doubts, as can be seen in songs like "Blu moon", "What kind of God is there in the sky"," Tommy.""

"I believe that beyond everything there is a wonderful plan in life that we almost never understand, because we usually consider the carpet on the side of the knots, not on the right side."

"There is no desire to be first in the world, to excel in the arts as well as in science and technology."

"Today we discovered technology. But are we the masters or his servants?"

"This must give the school: the meaning, the meaning. Not only Humanism, that is, being used or simply helped by science, but also Humanism, that is, understanding the meaning, having the purpose."

"We need to start over and do school, do it hard, with exams in September, meritocracy."

"Boys have to work hard. Just pet them, kick their ass from an early age."

"Making sacrifices is a great key word."

"I am Catholic, but as a boy going to Mass, in my opinion, was a waste of time. Then I realized that this was the place."

"If your child comes home and says they are upset, don't believe them, there are no teachers who upset them."

"I would ask the school first of all to teach what is beautiful, to spread harmony, to explain the meaning of values."

"[You go to school] To become a person."

"The Gaber of the end of the Seventies knows two essential things. One: artistic life should not be thrown away. Two: the song isn't just something you sing in three minutes. It must enter into a discourse, into a dialogue that takes on even more live. Gaber understood that the song is not just an object to be sold, and since it brings people into people's homes it should be experienced together with these people. In a suitable place. And from these assumptions comes the bringing of the song to theatre, his greatest discovery. [...] Giorgio gives lightning importance to the words and concepts that he expresses with them. The music, although spot on, almost only dresses them up. What matters is the word, which becomes magical the moment fifteen hundred people are united in a theater listening to it."

"For Gaber "reality is further ahead". It starts from contradictions, from internal contradictions that no one, or almost no one, usually underlines. His testimony therefore becomes first self-criticism, and then criticism of society. A much broader denunciation is made, and in fact Gaber will be able to continue it into the Eighties and Nineties. Moreover, the idea - fundamental even today - that we "believe" we are free while in fact we are "farmed chickens", could not have come from the political song à la Guccini nor from the anger of a Vasco. It could only come to an intellectual of song like Giorgio. The second pillar of the intellectualism of Italian song. The other is Fabrizio De André, who however made a more abstract argument. Gaber, on the other hand, specialized in reality, towards which he was ferocious, but never nihilist."

"The true songwriter song is a synthesis of existence, said in an overall simple way. Because although some songs seem convoluted and difficult, two readings are always enough to understand them. Furthermore, the true songwriting does not want to propagate absolute truths, but paths, yes."

"Gaber was simple and clear, he didn't shout truth but proposed ways. Also reporting the importance of pain, the need in life to overcome difficult trials. All things that the novels give us, and yet in a more direct way today they come to us precisely from the songs of the author. The quickest way to enter the contemporary. Which has always been Giorgio Gaber's aim: to sing the illogical joy of living reality."

"Lights at San Siro that evening | what's strange we've all been there, | do you remember the game in the fog? (from Luci a San Siro)"

"My Milan take me away, it's so cold, | I'm disgusted and I can't take it anymore, | let's make a change, take it | that little bit of money that little bit of celebrity | but give me back my six hundred, | my twenties and a girl you know | Milan sorry I was joking, | they won't turn on any more lights at San Siro. (from Luci a San Siro)"

"How nice to have two talents, you only have to give back twenty; you just try to get a hundred and God is on your toes with the bill. (from Through the Eye of a Needle)"

"He who has won is there who vomits his wine | and what ultimately matters is the intestine. (from Aiace)"

"And you take out half the camp, hundreds and hundreds of heads fly apart, only to take an inventory and then see that they are not your judges, they are oxen. (from Ajax)"

"And Marco Polo cheated them: | doge, wife, turkish, ideas, | he left Chioggia and arrived | no further down than Bari, | no further down than Bari, | then he said "I saw magical orientations", | but at least he had had some imagination; | the Venetians applauding | only envy and hypocrisy. (from Song for Laura)"

"The poets are old gentlemen | that eat the stars | lying on the meadows | of their villas, | and they invent gypsies and blackberries | to make oneself credible in the eyes of the world | with their pain. (from The Poets)"

"Anger once marked her | only the locomotive | thrown a stone on the road; | now it's market day | poets emerge in clusters | all the islands have found. (from Song for Francesco, n. 2, Side B)"

"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)"