Singers From Italy

"From what little I know, a language declines to the level of a dialect (or a dialect rises to the dignity of a language) solely for historical and political reasons and not for reasons intrinsic to the language itself. This Italian, this Florentine dialect that started out as vernacular, has become a lofty, prudish, bourgeois and bigoted language, through which not even all the terms in the vocabulary can be expressed: if you say “fica”, you'll be thrown out of the hotel. In Genoa, anyone who says “mussa” and “belín” causes no scandal. If you say it in Italian, all hell breaks loose. (p. 39)"

"(About marginalisation) It removes you from power and therefore from the mud. It brings you closer to God's point of view. (p. 159)"

"I sang imitating Modugno, and besides, how could one not be influenced by him?"

"I have no doubt about the total character that the struggle for the independence of Sardinia can take on if we work in a truly revolutionary way. Because the anti-colonial liberation struggle of a people is exemplary for all colonised peoples, indeed for all the exploited peoples of the world... In Nuoro, important work has begun, I believe, because it can have an impact on society... The signs should not be underestimated, because a new reality is emerging today in Sardinia with the need to liberate the masses and give them a national and international voice. Since I cannot help but say that I am against small and large power games, against bottlenecks and delays that are artfully manoeuvred, I am firmly convinced that the Sardinian knot will certainly not be untangled by the simple and imperturbable methods of changing the presidency of the Palace. Much more is needed! It is the people who must change things. Sardinia, with its own language, history and territory, has the right to be recognised as a nation."

"To paraphrase Flaubert, we can say that while the Almighty gave Genoa the sun and the sea, he left the Milanese with rain so that they would have something to talk about, then he changed his mind and gave them fog too, so that even today they have two topics of conversation. Yet, amid this sun and this very blue (so to speak) sea, terrible tragedies have occurred, including the relatively recent sinking of the London Valour. (p. 80)"

"When a navigator leaves the quay of the port of the city where he lives, the moment of detachment from security and certainty arrives, perhaps in the form of a wife, guardian of the marriage bed, waving a light, tear-stained handkerchief from the shore, the detachment from the little garden, from the lemon tree and, if the sailor leaves from Genoa, certainly from the pot of basil planted there on the balcony, to whet the appetite of the others, those who remain, the deserters of the sea. (p. 78)"

"(About Christopher Columbus) It seems to me that in Genoa there is a rather widespread attitude of astonished resignation, an attitude of contempt typical of us Genoese who, despite the clichés, are much more sensitive to moral criticism than we are to the glitter of coins. [...] All this has brought upon the innocent and astonished Genoa almost the shame of having given birth to a genius of navigation, a man who tended to be mild-mannered but who, in his mature years, made the grave mistake of putting the desire for glory and wealth before those ethical principles that no truly great man should ever fail to uphold, regardless of the historical period in which he lived. (pp. 97-98)"

"Our world is divided into winners and losers, where the former number three and the latter three billion. How can we be optimistic?"

"What I think is useful is to have the government as close to me as possible and the state, if it really can't be avoided, as far away from my balls as possible."

"In Milan, everyone walks like mice, using very small spaces in a very short time; in Tempio, the exact opposite happens: we all walk with long strides and few worries; the spaces are still enormous and the time it takes to complete many projects can even be considered “geological time”. Genoa, from this point of view, represents an enviable middle ground. (p. 131)"

"Riccardo Mannerini was another great friend of mine. He was almost blind because when he was sailing on a Costa ship, a boiler exploded in his face. He committed suicide many years later, without ever receiving any compensation. He had bad experiences with the law because he was a true libertarian, so when someone wanted by the police knocked on his door, he would hide them in his house. He would even treat their wounds and remove the bullets from their bodies. We wrote Cantico dei Drogati (Song of the Drug Addicts) together, which for me, as someone who was totally addicted to alcohol, had a liberating, cathartic value. However, the text did not scare me; on the contrary, I was pleased with it. It is a common reaction among drug addicts to take pleasure in the fact that they are taking drugs. I took pleasure in drinking, partly because alcohol allowed my imagination to run wild."

"It is the people who create problems who do not change."

"The Genoese seems to be a language created for songs, just as Hebrew is a language of prophecies. (p. 234)"

"I come from Hamburg, I come from Frankfurt, I come from Sardinia, but above all I come from Genoa. Genoa, which every time you find yourself outside, you realise is a city to be missed above all else. In the sense that you are born there and live there until you are twenty – where, as a poet friend of ours said, you burn with unawareness – then at twenty you try to find work and [...] you realise that it is difficult to work there. So you leave. And after you leave, you begin to miss it."

"If the so-called “best” among us had the courage to underestimate themselves at least a little, we would live in an infinitely better world."

"This is a song that dates back to 1962, where I show that I have always had, both as a young man and as an old man, very few ideas, but on the other hand, they are fixed. In the sense that in this song I express what I have always thought: that there is very little merit in virtue and very little blame in error. Also because, despite my fifty-eight years, I have not yet managed to understand exactly what virtue is and what error is, because we only need to move to a different latitude to see how values become disvalues and vice versa. Not to mention moving through time: there were morals in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that are no longer recognised today. Today we complain: I see that there is great torment over the loss of values. We need to wait and see how they develop over time. I don't think that young people today have no values; they certainly have values that we have not yet managed to understand properly, because we are too attached to our own."

"Genoa [...] has always been this way [multiracial] since the Middle Ages. I would say like Sarajevo. Five centuries ago, no one paid any attention if someone wore a turban. Genoa was born and grew up respecting different religions. There has never been a ghetto. The Church had little power, and neither did the Inquisition. There was never a torture chamber in the Doge's Palace. I don't think it was so much an Enlightenment vocation as the need to open up to everyone for commercial interests. Are the carugi full of Moroccans? This is nothing new for Genoa."

"Real questions and real answers are not made up of words: they are made up of actions, gestures, deeds, works in which words can also be compressed. Yet everything we do comes at a price in terms of anxiety, failure and, if all goes well, nostalgia."

"Every evening when I finish a concert, I want to turn to the audience and say: “Everything you have heard so far is completely false, just as the ideals and feelings that led me to write these things and sing them are completely true”. But ideals and feelings are used to construct dreamt-up realities. Reality, the real one, is what awaits us outside the theatre doors. And to change it, if we want to change it, we need concrete, real actions."

"I've never seen a musician communicate with the audience like Luciano does."

"The heart of the sailor is always dry, warming itself around the fire. The sailor does not love the sea: he works on it and fears it. He dreams of always having the earth under his feet, remembering the aromas, faces and flavours of home."

"Artists, damn it! I understand the poor integrated intellectual: he is someone who reads between the lines and understands what is going on much better than others. I understand that if he is not an artist, if he cannot transform what he understands into something else that comes across even better, he has to integrate: the artist is an antibody that society creates against power. If artists integrate, we're screwed!"

"Being master of only a small art, I often had to exchange it for food."

"Jesus of Nazareth [...] in my opinion, was and remains the greatest revolutionary of all time."

"If a miraculous voice had not performed La canzone di Marinella in 1967, I would most likely have finished my law studies and become a solicitor. I thank Mina for stacking the deck in my favour and, above all, to the benefit of my virtual clients."

"We [artists] are salespeople. It remains to be seen whether we are honest enough to sell fresh meat or rotten meat."

"From a quality of life perspective, apart from the devastating spectacle of the suburban areas, life in Sardinia is perhaps the best a man could wish for: twenty-four thousand kilometres of forests, countryside and coastline surrounded by a miraculous sea should coincide with what I would recommend to the good Lord to give us as Paradise. In my opinion, the Sardinians would make better decisions if they were independent within a European and Mediterranean community."

"(About his captors) [...] I can't say they scared me. I am more inclined to scrutinise other people's lives than my own, I am attracted to losers, I felt like an observer rather than a victim. I thought that they were the ones who were truly imprisoned, living with the same discomforts as us for a truly miserable wage [...]. Apart from my older songs such as “Il pescatore” and “Bocca di rosa”, they preferred those by Guccini. Once they begged Dori, in vain, to sing something for them. Songs I wrote later were inspired by their reflections, such as “Quello che non ho” (“What I don't have”), or by true stories they told me, such as “Franziska”. (p. 115)"

"[Speaking about his album Creuza de mä] Sometimes I felt proud, other times disappointed. But in any case, I always felt a little ashamed to find myself almost forced to leaf through specialised magazines, scrutinising with an almost snail-like eye, out of my sockets, what position my latest, so-called, record had achieved in the charts. Because this meant that the record, as an objective consumer product, had taken on greater importance than the songs for which it existed, and in which I sincerely felt I had lived."

"Mannerini taught me that being intelligent doesn't mean accumulating knowledge, but rather selecting it once it has been accumulated, trying to separate the useful from the useless. [...] I practically learned this ability to analyse and observe from him. He also influenced me politically, reinforcing ideas I already had. He was certainly one of the most important figures in my life."

"The left must not give the elderly a “past”, but a future."

"I tried in every way to be a man. I could have expressed myself, for example, through flower cultivation if I had lived in Albenga, or through cattle breeding if they hadn't secretly sold me a farm that my parents owned in 1954. I happened to become a singer-songwriter. Becoming an artist, in a way, prevents you from becoming a man in the normal way. So I believe that at a certain point in your life, you have to make up for the time you lost being an artist in order to try to become a man."

"Anarchism is possible in a new system of needs, finally freed from necessity. Unfortunately, necessities still exist."

"Capitalism cannot be democratic."

"You're not bad [Cristiano De André], you're just stupid!"

"For centuries, the people of Genoa have had a special relationship with French culture, both in music, as in the case of the chansonnier, and in cabinetmaking, with the Genoese Baroque style."

"History is written by the victors."

"What will I do with the money from this record? I don't know whether to spend it on having my face lifted to look younger, or to use it to give myself time to write something serious, to look older."

"During my kidnapping, my faith in people helped me, precisely where my faith in God was lacking. I have always said that God is a human invention, something utilitarian, a patch on our fragility... But, nevertheless, something changed during my kidnapping. It's not that I changed my mind, but it's certain that swearing today embarrasses me, to say the least."

"Why has there never been a writer as Minister of Culture?"

"[...] if I am classical high school, he (Francesco De Gregori) is university."

"I will die without knowing. On my tombstone, I will write: ‘Why did gay people like me so much?’[3]"

"(About Mina) When I was asked to celebrate her birthday, I thought about the value of the present and the past, and I realised that the imperfect or recent past tenses are not suitable for her. The right tense is the present indicative."

"In Gaber, the solidarity between words and sound becomes a gesture and a place in which to push the song: and thus Teatro Canzone is born, intelligent cabaret made up of sound and satire, daily tears and ancestral smiles, artistic paintings and popular songs. With Giorgio Gaber, words traverse the space of life and passionately engage in dialectical encounter with the voice of the heart: just like those who know that words are silk pyjamas, and the night is the altar that takes on their contours."

"Words take up our fears and certainties, organising them in such a way as to give them a completely new life and colour: from time to time, they precipitate and climb them like new rural and urban destinies, as if they were mists drowned by the sun and distributed over the heads of real and uncertain men."

"Siempre voto comunista."

"Mina was not, but she is. Mina did not “leave a mark”, but she leaves one every day. [4]"

"My relationship with communication is good in some ways and disastrous in others. Those who participate in Sanremo, for example, have four minutes to tell you a little about their world. Television is a truly absurd medium, capable of destroying any type of artist."

"Mango was a unique case in Italian pop music: he was able to combine refined melodies with a touch of vocal experimentalism and a sprinkling of ethnic influences, without losing sight of rock or singer-songwriter music, genres from which he always carefully avoided drawing any effects, chords or practices that were in any way predictable."

"Metaphorically speaking, one could say that Mango plays the part of an elf who moves nimbly and stealthily in a complex architectural environment, without knocking over the crystal glassware whose exact location only he knows, in a very pictorial and never banal vocal-instrumental ensemble. In his case, one can speak of “a voice that becomes an instrument with special modulations”."