A few questions for Antonello before the concert. Antonello, you have now joined social media. Is it a way of keeping alive the affection you always receive at your live shows? Yes, but I have been on there for a long time; I like it, I enjoy sharing my life. I have used Facebook as my personal diary for several years now, and I have Instagram for the more official messages. I love this kind of relationship: my audience are my friends, I welcome them into my life, into my home, with intimacy. I do improvised live streams, captured in the moment with spontaneity and sharing.
Photos of the concert of 3.5.2019
Photos of the concert of 3.5.2019
Photos: Gloria Bressan and Alfonso Gut
You have been singing “Ci vorrebbe un amico” since 1985, and on this tour you are bringing and meeting many friends, aren't you? In truth, the friends are both on stage, my colleagues, and in front of the stage, among the audience. They are people who follow me and are my age, but I always think of them as youngsters. This tour has been a success: the project started in Verona and then continued with various other dates and now abroad too, I am delighted. I have brought people my own age back to the concerts. For my generation, music stopped in the eighties: we had lost the seventy-year-olds at the shows, whereas I have won them back. What is more, I have always had a younger audience, and so the concerts are now becoming intergenerational, it is wonderful.
You have told the story of Rome in many ways, while some artists speak with nostalgia of a Rome that no longer exists (as Carlo Verdone did last September in his interview with Tuttoitalia). Can you confirm that “there is still a heart beating in the heart of Rome”? Carlo is a melancholic, like all great comedians! But the heart, I assure you, is always there. Rome is eternal, like its problems. But its problems are in the eyes of the beholder. Today the sun is glorious: you only have to look out of the window to see the beauty. Rome is the reflection of those who live it: it heightens the sadness, but also the joy. Rome's problem is that it should be better cared for. After all, we have always had the potholes. My songs are the essence of Rome, as an idea of universal beauty but also as unease. “Roma capoccia”… yes, but “Del mondo infame”… there is always a clash; in Rome the injustices are more unjust, the potholes deeper, everything is heightened, do you understand?
How, on the other hand, would you explain to an eighteen-year-old the journey that you and De Gregori recounted in “Bomba o non Bomba”? I think there is little to explain. I would like them to learn about that historical period, but without any claim to teach anything. You see, the beauty of my language is that you can look at it superficially, but also analyse it and discover different meanings, and that is why it is always current. People think there is an answer in music, whereas songs should teach us to ask questions, to create doubts, continual doubts. Take “Notte prima degli esami”: every verse is a film, worthy of being imagined, and the strength of music lies precisely in being accessible and adaptable to everyone. Then perhaps, during the concert in Zurich, I can tell who the protagonists of this song are and how we experienced it back in that era…
Regarding the importance of your language, you have received numerous awards for your poetics… They even made me an Accademico del Belli, but I always gave it little weight; I was happy about it, but I have never loved trophies. My mother had put them on display, she was proud of them. The importance of certain poetic verses you refer to changes according to the times you live in, and who knows how many more we will hear… what interests me is the future; the past I already know. In every period of apparent confusion, like the one we are living through, I like to think that moments of great creativity are born. You need the right eyes, semantics is fundamental, and I feel good in these times!
Certainly, during the concert in Zurich, we will sing his songs, making them a little our own, and we will all love his Rome a little.
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