When he died, more than half of Italy perceived him as a “divine error”, an interrupted musical revolution. Stop breathing like this, on the armchair of a Swiss hotel, after a perfect concert.
That idea of injustice, of an early end, of an unfinished work still lingers in the peninsula. Here because We talk about Lucio Dalla in the present, as if to reduce the damage. His house in the Zaragoza district of Bologna receives thousands of visitors a day and carusohis greatest creation, continues to dance down the throats of tenors and enthusiasts alikewith an incalculable peak of plays far beyond Spotify.
March is the month of Dalla and that’s why these days are full of freebies. He was born and died in March, with a difference of 68 years between the two acts. He was born as 4 (in 1943), died as 1 (2012) and left as many secrets as state debates.
The “Homo Musicus” who made his debut as a clarinetist in the Los Flippers jazz group and who for many enjoyed a privileged broken voice has left behind his property in the Tremiti Islands, a villa at the foot of Etna, hundreds of works of art which he has collected , a 22-metre boat and the copyright of more than 300 songs… The artist with whom she has lived for the past 10 years, Marco Alemmano, could not enjoy all that fortune. It was all meant for her cousins.
He has never made his sexuality public, but in Italy that very private matter exploded like a circus in certain sectors of TV and journalism: his relationship with men, his being close to Opus Dei, his ideological contradiction, that Catholic funeral with 6,000 people in the church of San Petronio and 50,000 who mourned outside the walls. The journalist Lucia Annunziata expressed it with surgical words: “Lucio Dalla’s funeral is one of the strongest examples of what it means to be homosexual in Italy: you go to church, they bury you with the Catholic rite, you just don’t say you’re gay. It’s the symbol of who we are.”
an enigmatic boy
“TOhere where the sea shines and the wind blows hard, on an old terrace overlooking the gulf of Sorrento, a man embraces a girl after crying“. It’s hard for someone not to be moved by that, one of the beginnings of the song that produces the most trembling. Lucio will always courage and suffocating grimace when he repeats I love you assaje / But you know so much.
the story of dimensions Dalla’s hymn to love, which Luciano Pavarotti interpreted with depth, It originates in the breakdown of Dalla’s ship, which sailed without looking for a specific letter. The accident forced him to stay in a hotel in Sorrento, the same one where Enrico Caruso spent his last days, the Grand Excelsior Vittoria.
“I sat at the piano in the suite and was inspired by an old Neapolitan song and what they told me: that despite being ill, Enrico Caruso was giving lessons to a young woman he was in love with, a forbidden love. He was about to die , look into the eyes of that girl among lights that look like stars, fishermen and boats”, Dalla explained. “I never thought it would sell 30 million copies worldwide.”
If a childhood is determined by a repeated scene, his is lying on his back, on the mosaic floor of his room. A nearby cinema and a resource: the art of listening and imagining what you couldn’t see.
Little Lucio lived next to an open-air “cinema paradise” and listened only to music and speeches. Raised on pure film looking at the ceiling, the film’s music did its silent work, sculpted his ear.
Father Joseph. He died when Lucio was seven years old, which “condemned” him to a very intense relationship with his mother, his great refuge. A basketball lover, he considered himself politically combative with that idea close to peasants and workers and his criticism of the Italian establishment.
in the 60s It was maestro Gino Paoli – the same singer who still lives with a bullet lodged near his heart after a suicide attempt – who suggested and directed him to become something like an Italian soul singer.
In 1971, his dizzying ascent began at the Sanremo Festival, when he presented 3/4/1943 (the title alluding to his date of birth), a theme renamed Baby Jesus. Only in 1977 with the album How deep is the seamakes his debut as the author of the lyrics of his own songs, which ushers in that era of composer.
From tenderness to outcry, this cult figure has been thought of as a poet trying to “understand the changes in society”. A lover of dialects, he was obsessed with the “official languages of the streets”. He has reached half a century of career and more than 30 albums released, he came to perform with Jimi Hendrix in Italy and influenced a following generation, Jovanotti, Eros Ramazzotti, Zucchero…
Deep lyricist, interpreter with a broken and melodramatic voice, he could be surrounded by 50 people and feel alone. His best friend, Stefano Cantaroni, told Rolling Stone magazine: “He was welcoming people, putting himself between their breath and the world, but basically he was a very lonely person.”
“The afternoon before the heart attack we spoke for the last time. He said: ‘Please be good to people'” Cantaroni remembered. “He never told me. Thirteen hours later he died.”
There is a book in his honor, And the singing begins again, a collection of speeches that the Bolognese singer-songwriter has given. On the back cover they question him, as if he were alive: “Lucio, who are you? A jazz clarinetist, a beatnik, a twenty-year-old soloist in Sanremo, a singer-songwriter, one of the most revolutionary musicians of the Italian song, a global pop star adored by four several generations?
Lucio is a possible biographical series, a possible film and many other projects. The great stumbling block for the producers is to dig into his private life, in his childhood and adolescent past, in the little he has told and has become a mysterious aura. For now there is already a nice documentary that premiered at the Berlinale 2021 (by Lucioby Pietro Marcello), a tribute with only two interviewees that offers a nostalgic vision of Bologna and that Italy of the immediate post-war period.
The man who was born less than 24 hours apart from another colleague of Lucio of his size, Battisti, the one who He also managed to get Marcello Mastroianni to participate in one of his albums (Henna) and the one who exchanged excited letters with Ennio Morricone he always declared that he thought it impossible that forty years had passed. A presentiment of premature death, of melancholy, invaded him, despite that public comic lineage that reached ecstasy when he sang and danced. Watch out for Wolf.
Death came to him as, perhaps, every musician would like: after a two-hour concert in front of 800 people at the Stravinsky Auditorium in Montreaux, after bursts of French banter and applause. Sitting in his room, going through all that adrenaline when his heart decided to stop beating. “It was as if inhabited by a primordial energy and he expressed it with his voice. He was the son of the muses, who are the union of the divine principle with our soul”, exclaims the Italian journalist Vito Mancuso in a text. “It will be a perpetual firework,” predicted his childhood friend Stefano Bonag.
“Good night, my soul, now I turn off the light and so be it.” That verse, taken from the song Costly she was chosen to adorn the tombstone of the family tomb where her ashes were placed.
“He was a liar, but a liar who didn’t hurt anyone”It was delicately painted by his eternal friend Cantaroni, with whom he toured the world and took up to 120 planes in one year. “He ignored the health warnings. Unfortunately he remained silent. He would leave at any hour, happy. Sitting in an armchair, like old people who fall asleep with their hand on their face and their glasses askew”.
Source: Clarin
