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Fabrizio De André

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Fabrizio De André

Fabrizio Cristiano De André (18 February 1940 – 11 January 1999) was an Italian singer-songwriter and the most-prominent cantautore of his time.

Quotes

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  • Benedetto Croce said that everyone writes poetry until the age of eighteen. From the age of eighteen onwards, two categories of people continue to write poetry: poets and idiots. So, as a precaution, I would prefer to consider myself a singer-songwriter.
  • From the TV programme La storia siamo noi, Fabrizio De André – In direzione ostinata e contraria. Video available on Rai.it (00:50).
  • There are those who are touched by faith and those who merely cultivate the virtue of hope [...], the God in whom, despite everything, I continue to hope, is an entity above the parties, above the factions.
  • Ettore Cannas, La dimensione religiosa nelle canzoni di Fabrizio De André, ed. Segno.
  • Do they complain about gypsies? Look at them going around begging for votes: but they don't go on foot, they have buses that look like spaceships, trains, aeroplanes: and look at them when they stop for lunch or dinner: they know how to eat with a knife and fork, and with a knife and fork they will eat your savings. Italy belongs to a hundred men, but are we sure that these hundred men belong to Italy?
  • Singing alone with my guitar would give me the same feeling as getting down on all fours in the De Ferrari fountain at midday.
  • Genova è mia moglie, p. 23.
  • Genoa is also the friends who live far away and watch you grow up and grow old, for example the pescuèi who, just like in Il pescatore, have faces furrowed with wrinkles that look like smiles, and whatever you confide in them, they already know from the sea.
  • Genova è mia moglie, p. 143.
  • During the war, I was displaced to Piedmont, and for me, Genoa was a myth, something extraordinary. When I saw it for the first time at the age of five, I immediately fell in love with it, tremendously, and at the first match of my life, Genoa-Sampierdarenese, I immediately married the team that bore the name of my city. It was a love that I never betrayed, the most solid of my life, which was full of constant contradictions.
  • From an interview by Gigi Speroni, De André s'arrabbia con Gaber, Domenica del Corriere, 6 January 1974, p. 3.
  • When I go out in public, I'm very afraid of being criticised. Controlling your facial muscles, for example, which should be an actor's job, is a specific thing, it's a precise skill. Putting my face in front of my songs annoyed me first of all because it seemed to me that my songs remained behind my face, whose muscles I couldn't control, and secondly, the fact that I couldn't control them also worried me. In the sense that I didn't consider myself an actor at all, that is, a person suited to showing his face in a certain way. Maybe I say “you sleep buried in a field of wheat” and I'm laughing, but I don't realise it because I'm not used to acting out what I'm saying. Because I wrote that song, I didn't have to act it out. I'm not capable of acting. I consider myself, in a way, someone who can also make music to accompany lyrics. I consider myself a guitar player. I don't go beyond that. I don't think I'm the ideal interpreter of my songs. Because to be an interpreter, you have to be something different. I don't think I'm an interpreter, because you always have to have the face you had when you wrote the verse. The face you had when you felt it. And it's not like I write verses in front of the mirror. In fact, I don't like myself that much.
  • From an interview published in the TV programme Fabrizio De André, Sarzana, 29 August 1981, at the RAI offices in Emilia Romagna, directed by Vittorio Lusvardi. Video available on Youtube.com.
  • After ten years of slapping each other, you either become friends or you kill each other.
  • 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.
  • For me, Genoa is like a mother, it's where I learned to live.
  • What struck me about the world of the carruggi was the habit of suffering and therefore solidarity. They were supportive on any occasion, because they were the underclass, not even a specific class that could be grasped by the traditional political parties. It was a world that defended itself to some extent from the state, and so I wallowed in it. I already had precise political ideas, derived from Brassens, whom I listened to from morning to night, thanks to the records my father brought me from France, and he described this world, these marginalised characters that I then found in Genoa.
  • From an interview to L'Agnata, Tempio Pausania, 17-18 August 1992; quoted in Non per un dio ma nemmeno per gioco, p. 64.
  • 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.
  • Deve essere il popolo a modificare le cose, Sa Repubblica Sarda, Alfa Editrice, Quartu Sant'Elena, year IV, Issue 5, 12 November 1982.
  • 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.
  • From an interview to Senzapatria, 14 August 1991.
  • Our world is divided into winners and losers, where the former number three and the latter three billion. How can we be optimistic?
  • From an interview to Senzapatria, 14 August 1991.
  • I sang imitating Modugno, and besides, how could one not be influenced by him?
  • Il Giornale, 8 August 1994.
  • Genoa is a democratic and liberal city. It is tolerant because it has always done business with everyone regardless of language, customs, clothing or skin colour.
  • From an interview by Mario Luzzatto Fegiz, «Questa città multirazziale, come Sarajevo», Corriere della Sera, 18 November 1997, p. 17.
  • 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.
  • From an interview by Mario Luzzatto Fegiz, «Questa città multirazziale, come Sarajevo», Corriere della Sera, 18 November 1997, p. 17.
  • 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.
  • From the introductory comment to La città vecchia, Teatro Brancaccio di Roma, 14 February 1998.
  • 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.
  • I've never seen a musician communicate with the audience like Luciano does.
  • 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.
  • From the acknowledgements of the album Mi innamoravo di tutto, 1997.
  • Jesus of Nazareth [...] in my opinion, was and remains the greatest revolutionary of all time.
  • From a speech about the song entitled Buona novella in a 1998 concert. Video available on Youtube.com (01:25).
  • 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.
  • Quoted in Il Secolo XIX, 2009, and in Luigi Berlinguer and Antonello Mattone, La Sardegna, Einaudi, 1998, p. 909. ISBN 88-06-14334-4.
  • 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.
  • Non per un dio ma nemmeno per gioco, p. 111.
  • De André introduced the young singer-songwriter to Nanni Ricordi, record producer, with these words. Quoted in Enrico Deregibus, Francesco De Gregori. Quello che non so, lo so cantare, Giunti, 2002, p. 45. ISBN 978-88-09-75626-7
  • 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.
  • Quoted in L'amore sacro, l'amor profano – omaggio a Fabrizio De André, Piero Ameli (editors), BURsenzafiltro, Bergamo, 2006. Attachment to the DVD entitled Omaggio a Fabrizio De André, tribute concert recorded on 10 July 2005 at the Roman Amphitheatre in Cagliari. ISBN 88-17-01296-3.
  • You're not bad [Cristiano De André], you're just stupid!
  • Un talento perseguitato dalla fama del padre, Corriere della Sera, 10 July 2006.
  • 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.
  • Quoted in Antonio Oleari, Un viaggio lungo 40 anni, Aereostella, Milano, 2008, p. 20. Also quoted in Francesco De Nicola, Il sogno e l'avventura: la vita e la poesia di Riccardo Mannerini in Riccardo Mannerini, Il sogno e l'avventura. Poesie 1955 – 1980, Francesco De Nicola and Maria Teresa Caprile (editors), Liberodiscrivere edizioni, Genova, 2009, p. 13. ISBN 978-88-7388-236-7.
  • Genoa is like a mother to me. It is where I learned to live. It gave birth to me and raised me until I was thirty-five years old: and that is no small thing, in fact, it is perhaps almost everything. Today, it seems to me that Genoa has the face of all the poor devils I met in its carruggi, the outcasts I would later find in Sardinia, the “graziose” of Via del Campo.
  • What is loyalty, after all? It's nothing more than a big itch with a strict ban on scratching.
  • From a speech during a concert. Quoted in Dentro Faber, vol. 1, L'Amore, RAI Trade per RCS, 2011.
  • (About the the Sanremo Music Festival If it were still a singing competition, [...] that is, if it were a matter of vocal cords, it could still be considered an almost sporting competition, because vocal cords are still muscles. In my case, I would have to express my feelings, or the technique through which I am able to express them, and I believe that this cannot be a matter of competition.
  • From an interview with Enzo Biagi at the TV programme Linea Diretta, Rai, 1985; in Dentro Faber, Vol. 8, Poesia In Forma Di Canzone, RAI Trade per RCS, 2011.
  • 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.
  • From an interview reported in Dentro Faber, vol. 4, L'uomo, il potere, la guerra, RAI Trade per RCS, 2011.
  • 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.
  • Quoted in Dentro Faber, Vol. 5, Genova E Il Mediterraneo, RAI Trade per RCS, 2011.
  • And then suddenly love burst out everywhere.
  • Genoa is beautiful, you realise it is beautiful when you are far away.
  • Quoted in Roberto Paravagna, Note genovesi, Il Piviere, 2013, p. 128.
  • I can't write about Genoa because I'm too involved. I don't write anthem because I don't like marches and because nothing can surpass the chants of the Gradinata Nord. If anything, I would have written a love song for Genoa, but I don't do it because to write songs you need to maintain a certain detachment from what you write, whereas Genoa involves me too much.
  • Dear Andrea, I am your friend because you are the only priest who does not want to send me to heaven by force.
  • (About Paolo Villaggio) I met him for the first time in Pocol, above Cortina; I was an angry kid who swore a lot; he liked me because I was tormented and restless, and he was the same, only he was more controlled, perhaps because he was older than me, so he immediately took on the role of older brother and said to me: “Look, you mustn't swear, you swear to be the centre of attention, you're an arsehole”.
  • [Preghiera in gennaio] I dedicated it to Tenco. It was written, or rather conceived, on the way back from Sanremo, where my ex-wife Enrica Rignon, Anna Paoli and I had rushed to. After seeing Luigi lying in that morgue (outside Sanremo, because they didn't want us there) and then returning to Genoa to wait for the funeral, which was to take place two days later in Cassine, I think, this composition came to me.

Mixer

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Rai due, 1 March 1984. Video available on YouTube.com]
  • [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.
  • Even today, in some so-called primitive ethnic groups, singing still has the fundamental task of freeing people from suffering, alleviating pain and exorcising evil.
  • It was necessary to adapt a language to the sounds produced by these instruments, a language that would glide over them, evoking through sung phonemes, regardless of their immediate comprehensibility, the same atmospheres that the instruments evoked. The most suitable language for us seemed to be Genoese, with its diphthongs, its hiatuses, its wealth of truncated nouns and adjectives that can be shortened or lengthened almost like the cry of a seagull.

Cantico per i diversi

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From an interview by Roberto Cappelli, Muschio selvaggio, n°. 176, September 1992
  • The much-talked-about Genoese school did not exist as a unified movement. Of course, we all knew each other, because Genoa is not such a big city. We would meet, for example, at the bar on Corso d'Italia. There was no coordination, but there was a desire to emulate each other. One of the first songs I wrote was Il testamento, and I remember playing it first to Gino Paoli at his house. He listened to it in silence and at the end he said to me: “It's beautiful, but after a song like this, what else can one write?”. (p. 32)
  • I also think that Il testamento di Tito, together with Amico fragile, is my best song. It gives an idea of how laws might change if they were written by those who do not have power. It is another of the songs written from the heart, without fear of appearing rhetorical, and I can still sing it today without tiring. (p. 35)
  • For me, Genoese is not a dialect but a language; after all, dialects rise to the dignity of languages for political and military reasons. [...] Genoese has at least 2,500 words of Arabic origin, which shows how intense contact with the Arabs was. Moreover, from a commercial point of view, apart from its rather sporadic relations with Europe (England and Holland), Genoa had to focus its trade on Africa, because on the other side there was Venice, and every time Genoese ships tried to venture beyond Crete, there were fierce battles. But in those days, Genoese and Venetian were the international languages, just as French and English are today. (p. 40)

Speciale TG1

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From an interview by Vincenzo Mollica, Video available on Rai.it
  • Interviewer: What is Fabrizio De André afraid of today? De André: Death, for sure. Not so much my own death, which, when it comes, if it gives me time to realise it, will make me feel my fair share of fear, but rather the death that surrounds us, the lack of attachment to life that I see in many of our fellow human beings who kill themselves for reasons that are certainly much more futile than the value of life. I am afraid of what I do not understand, and I really cannot understand this.
  • Interviewer: What is the wish you would like to fulfil? De André: [...] definitely, anywhere, anytime, to meet my father again.
  • Interviewer: What value do utopia and dreams have for you? De André: I think that a man without utopia, without dreams, without ideals, that is to say without passions and without enthusiasm, would be a monstrous animal made simply of instinct and reason, a kind of wild boar with a degree in pure mathematics.
  • Interviewer: What is song for you today, deep down? De André: Song is an old girlfriend with whom I would still very much like to spend a good part of my life, always and only if I am welcome.

Amico fragile. Fabrizio De André

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Cesare G. Romana (editor), Amico fragile. Fabrizio De André, Sperling & Kupfer, 1999. ISBN 88-200-1214-6
  • Genoa. What does it mean to me? I was lucky enough to be born into this ethnic group, in this small world where a different language is spoken, which was part of a much larger state but with its own language, cuisine and culture. This makes you feel so close to these people who share your diversity, you feel different from the rest of the world, you are a member of a large family of seven hundred thousand people who have their own customs and traditions. And if you arrive in Milan, you arrive as an immigrant from the South. (pp. 8-9)
  • Where does the nostalgia we all feel for Genoa come from? You say, and you are right, that our musical tradition is full of emigrants who miss their city and dream of returning to it, which is also found in Neapolitan songs and those of other seaside cities, while this is not the case in Milan or Turin. But perhaps this is because the Milanese were born rich and do business on the mainland, while the Genoese were born poor and had to trade by sea, far from home. (p. 9)
  • [...] Genoa is also the scent and flavour of its cuisine. Like those of pesto, which Dori and I make in Milan or Gallura, putting lots of walnuts in it so that it doesn't taste of mint: as happens when you make pesto far from Genoa. Because only basil from Genoa “doesn't taste of it”. (p. 10)
  • I remember one day I grabbed my mother and pushed her against a window, so hard that she cut herself all over, and my father decided to teach me a lesson. He gave me so many lashes that my bum swelled up like a pandolce, then he asked me, 'Do you have anything to say to your mother? I said no. In retaliation, he took my sticker albums – I had five or six – and burned them all in the middle of the room. I remained impassive. He grabbed a shoe and hit me on the head with the heel. Then he repeated, “Do you have anything to say to your mother?” 'No,' I replied. He left, and I had won. (p. 20)
  • I used rubber picks to mimic the style of Jimmy Hall, a guitarist who produced a sound as soft as snow. (p. 42)
  • Three cultures intertwined in Brassens: Central European, with the waltz, French, with the java, and Neapolitan, with the tarantella [...]. That's why my first songs were based on those rhythms and that atmosphere. Then I was intrigued by the fact that he dealt with controversial issues of great social relevance, dismissing them and singing about them with the nonchalance of an English actor rather than a French one: because French actors are emphatic and declamatory, while English actors say terrifying things with a kind of icy indifference. Brassens, in short, was my great role model, even though, having had the opportunity, I always avoided meeting him in person: I needed to keep him as a myth; if this myth had collapsed upon meeting him, my world would have collapsed. So I preferred to imagine him only through his songs. (p. 43)
  • (About Luigi Tenco) Let's leave him in peace, let's stop digging him up. (p. 57)
  • (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)
  • Writing songs in Italian is technically difficult because the requirements of metre mean you need a large number of truncated words, which do not exist in Italian, or at least are not abundant. At this point, in order to guarantee the aesthetic quality of the verse, you are forced to change the meaning of what you want to say. Genoese, on the other hand, is an agile language, and it is possible to find a truncated synonym that has the same meaning as the prose outline you have jotted down and then translated into verse, since ideas rarely come to you already organised metrically. This is a problem we Italians have, while the English and French do not, as their languages are much richer in truncated words, and writing in Genoese made it much easier to solve. (p. 136)
  • I will wait tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and maybe another hundred years until Mrs Liberty and Miss Anarchy are considered by the majority of my fellow human beings as the best possible form of civil coexistence, not forgetting that in Europe, even in the mid-18th century, republican institutions were considered utopian. And remembering with pride and regret the happy and all too brief libertarian experience of Kronstadt, an episode of brotherhood and egalitarianism suddenly bombarded by Mr Trotsky. (p. 157)
  • (About marginalisation) It removes you from power and therefore from the mud. It brings you closer to God's point of view. (p. 159)

Sotto le ciglia chissà - I diari

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Fabrizio De André, Sotto le ciglia chissà. I diari, Mondadori, Milano, 2016. ISBN 978-88-04-65821-4
  • 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)
  • Genoa played a fundamental role. Because Genoa is a hypercritical city. If you don't make people laugh or cry, you'd better stop doing those jobs. It's a very strict city and in this sense I find it very similar to Sardinia. (p. 43)
  • Dialects are idioms not imposed by authority, but invented by ethnic groups who had an urgent need to communicate: I say urgent, but in fact they had plenty of time to invent, to refine languages that increasingly resembled themselves and their surroundings. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that local languages resemble the places where they are spoken: thus, certain harshnesses that I find in the Aosta Valley dialect, which seem to respond to and echo the hardness of the surrounding mountain rocks, are softened in the Piedmontese dialect of the great plain, which sounds as sweet as the language of neighbouring France.
    Similarly, the stickiness of Ligurian, particularly Genoese, is not so far removed from the “'lepego”', the slipperiness of boat decks and piers. (p. 65)
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • She was the usual generous mother in the spectacularity of the oblique and changing landscapes, an affectionate mother in bestowing a Shangri-La climate, an extremely strict parent towards those who let themselves be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her Mediterranean breath, always warm.
    That was the Genoa from which I separated myself due to a love affair, and we ended up growing apart. Two different subjects: she, cradling the children who had stayed at home, the favourite parishioners of the Sunday seafront or the rough altercations dressed as princes, dockers and purple-robed entrepreneurs; I, cultivating smoky Lombardies of boundless femininity. I was a former son, a bastard and forgotten by her, and she was for me a large blue apron, perfumed with marjoram, whose scent I would remember from time to time: in short, a city to be regretted. (pp. 83-84)
  • (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)
  • 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)
  • Genoa is to Milan as Italy is roughly to Germany. Cold-blooded populations have always done everything they can to come and piss their winter fogs into our seas. (p. 132)
  • Genoa was a training ground where I practised living and, thanks also to the neighbouring cultures, thinking, writing and playing music. (p. 135)
  • “'And on your buried Genoa | not a handful of earth but | a cascade of dry leaves | with the face of Marx. | In your solitude full of faces | of children and soldiers | have you ever wondered | why challenge the sea?”' (p. 136)
  • Regardless of the game and the result, I would hardly say that the match has all the characteristics of the old class struggle: a proletarian Genoa against a plutocratic and highly decorated Milan. (p. 212)
  • The Genoese seems to be a language created for songs, just as Hebrew is a language of prophecies. (p. 234)

Una goccia di splendore

[edit]
Fabrizio De André, Una goccia di splendore. Un'autobiografia per parole e immagini, Guido Harari (editor), Rizzoli, 2007. ISBN 978-88-17-01166-2.
  • It is the people who create problems who do not change.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • It is much more difficult to be understood when doing good than when doing evil.
  • The left must not give the elderly a “past”, but a future.
  • Capitalism cannot be democratic.
  • Anarchism is possible in a new system of needs, finally freed from necessity. Unfortunately, necessities still exist.
  • The social discomfort of people suits those who extort consensus: people who are uncomfortable, without work, without money, are easily influenced and are very easy sources of consensus (including electoral consensus).
  • Interviewer: Does money attract you, Mr De André? De André: Yes, it is I who have never managed to attract it.
  • 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.
  • History is written by the victors.
  • No history of peace has ever been written.
  • Why has there never been a writer as Minister of Culture?
  • Television is like history: there are those who make it and those who suffer it.
  • Sometimes I wonder if we who sing along with the audience are not just a “club” of romantic young ladies playing “handball” within the walls of a pomegranate garden while outside people are tearing each other apart.
  • Don't ask a songwriter what he thought or felt before writing a song: it's precisely because he doesn't want to tell you that he started writing. The answer is in the song.
  • Why do I write? Out of fear. For fear that the memory of the lives of the people I write about will be lost. For fear that the memory of me will be lost. Or even just to be protected by a story, to slip into a story and no longer be recognisable, controllable, blackmailable.
  • Music is not symbolic. Music represents itself. It is a protomental phenomenon, it anticipates reason. It evokes, but not symbolically.
  • There is no radical contradiction in transforming a poem into sung music. If anything, there is a formal need to vulgarise that poem, in the sense of modifying its lexicon by interpolating it with vulgar language, which can reach the feelings and reason of a wider audience. All this with the help of the magic of music, which remains the only universal language I know.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • You will buy me life with songs and smiles.
  • Being master of only a small art, I often had to exchange it for food.
  • We [artists] are salespeople. It remains to be seen whether we are honest enough to sell fresh meat or rotten meat.
  • Rarely has an artist been a hero. More often than not, he lives in isolation, like a very shy rabbit.
  • Not having a home means having the culture of the street, understanding the sky and the clouds, knowing the herbs and fruits, driving a cart or a car, getting a horse to obey you and avoiding the police. Writing takes time, even for the chatter of a concert. But it is better not to write a whole sentence than to remove a single word that gives meaning to a sentence.
  • Men fall into two categories: those who think and those who let others think.
  • I usually reserve sensational endings that elicit applause for songs.
  • When you have no chance to decide your own fate, you put yourself in the hands of someone who, at that moment, you hope exists. And so you give in to the temptation of prayer: not your own prayer, which you may not be capable of, but one of those you were taught as a child and which, perhaps, you still remember by heart.
  • The worst thing when you are about to die is knowing that you have a chance to save yourself.
  • I don't feel responsible for being better than others. What I can't stand is taking pleasure in proving it.
  • Loneliness (its close relative, silence, must be learned to listen to. Silence does not exist) does not exist; in the sense that loneliness does not consist in being alone, but rather in not knowing how to keep oneself company. Those who do not know how to keep themselves company will find it difficult to keep others company. That is why you can be alone in the midst of a thousand people, and that is also why you can find yourself in your own company and be happy (for example, listening to silence, a close relative of solitude). But true silence does not exist, just as true solitude does not exist. Just surrender to the voices of the Universe.
  • Through the practice of solitude, one cultivates dignity: I find it far more dignified to beg for alms than to stab one's colleague in the back at the office.
  • Cancer and AIDS are polite beasts: they eat a very meagre ration of flesh compared to what you have eaten, and they do not leave you alone as you try to do with them.
  • If I believed in God, I would believe that life promises us a heavenly dessert after a horrible meal.

Quotes about

[edit]
  • He had just written Preghiera in gennaio (Prayer in January) in one night. I wanted to know where he got his inspiration from, and he told me that he slept during the day and went out at night to listen to the sounds of the countryside.
  • Luigi Riva, quoted in Elvira Serra, La sera ascolto De Andrè ricordando il nostro whisky. Avrei voluto il Pallone d'Oro, Corriere della Sera, 12 February 2017, p. 25.
  • We met because we were both curious about each other. It happened in Bologna, it must have been in '66 [...] We even thought about doing, if not a tour, then at least a concert together. It would have been “epoch-making” (so to speak). But then, for various reasons, nothing ever came of it. He also said: “...Yes, I'd really like to, etc., but then you talk a lot, and I never say anything, I wouldn't want to make a fool of myself...” He never said anything during his shows.
  • As Fabrizio said, a song may not be necessary, but it's always worth writing it.
  • Cristiano De André, quoted in De André, una tachipirina per l'anima, Il Mattino, 19 December 2010.
  • What do I remember most about my father? His stubbornness, which was countered by my desire to spite him. We were only twenty-three years apart in age.
  • Cristiano De André, Lourdes mi ha cambiato. Ora posso cantare De André, Corriere della Sera, 13 September 2009.
  • It was a devastating encounter. I heard Tutti morimmo a stento for the first time when I was 16 and I was blown away, it brought me into adulthood. De André changed my life, he showed me the other side of the coin that I didn't know. With him, I discovered that there were the dispossessed, the excluded, drugs and prostitutes. Everything that's on the other side of the moon. He taught me that we can all make mistakes in life. We can be Bocca di rosa and Marinella. We mustn't stand on a pulpit and judge anyone. He was a master.
  • Fabrizio is one of the great poets of rock, in fact, for me, he is a saint.
  • Fabrizio De André is a chansonnier, and he is one in the truest sense: the sense in which poetry, literary text and music necessarily coexist.
  • Mario Luzi, from an interview by Paolo Di Paolo, Offrire versi con simpatia, ItaliaLibri, Milano, 11 December 2002.
  • Fabrizio belongs to everyone.
  • Fabrizio was a generous and combative man, easy to love and very difficult to get along with. One of my fondest memories of him is when we went to the Idroscalo in Milan on the roller coaster at the Luna Park, together with Dori: we got off happy and drunk with our stomachs in our mouths and ended the evening who knows where.
  • Fabrizio lo conoscevo bene, ci siamo sempre stimati, anche se frequentavamo ambienti molto diversi. Lui era figlio di uno degli uomini più ricchi di Genova, io di uno dei più poveri. Non c'è mai stato modo di fare qualcosa insieme. [...] Anche se musicalmente c'è troppo Brassens per chi Brassens lo conosce, credo che La buona novella sia il disco più bello mai fatto in Italia.
  • Giornate intere di bonaccia, calma quasi piatta, e poi improvvise scosse elettriche con rincorse verso l'alto o verso il basso. In alto lo spirito filosofico e in basso il fondo dei garbugli umani. Secondo l'umore, secondo la giornata. Troppo terribilmente intelligente per definirlo un buono. Ma quest'ultimo era il Fabrizio che preferivo.
  • I miei vangeli sono cinque: Matteo, Marco, Luca, Giovanni e... Fabrizio.
Oltre ai quattro testi "canonici", ho da sempre un quinto evangelo, quello secondo De André. È la mia Buona Novella laica. :Scandalizza i benpensanti, ma è l'eco delle parole dell'uomo di Nazareth che, ne sono certo, affascinò il mio amico Fabrizio.
  • Io associo la voce di Fabrizio a un vuoto che gli si fa intorno: lui chiede spazio e chiede tempo, prima di tutto col timbro della voce, con il modo con il quale scandisce le parole. Non si poteva ascoltarlo se non mettendo quella voce su una specie di ara, attorno alla quale non potevi far altro che dare un ascolto totale alle sue parole.
  • Michele Serra, quoted in Cesare G. Romana, Smisurate preghiere. Sulla cattiva strada con Fabrizio De André, Roma, Arcana, 2005, p. 90. ISBN 88-7966-394-1.
  • La forza dei veri artisti si vede anche dalla fortuna di dare piacere e fare compagnia anche dopo che se ne sono andati. In Italia è accaduto solo per De André e Gaber, attorno ai quali ci si ritrova in tanti, senza mai meravigliarsi che nel novero degli amici ci siano persone estremamente difformi per idee politiche e calibro culturale, senza nessuna necessità di dover giustificare differenti punti di partenza.
  • Michele Serra, quoted in Al sicuro dalla banalità; in Gaber, Giorgio, il Signor G. Raccontato da intellettuali, amici, artisti, Andrea Pedrinelli (editor), Kowalski, Milano, 2008, p. 119. ISBN 978-88-7496-754-4
  • La memoria di Fabrizio ha diritto oggi a qualcosa di diverso, ne sono più che convinto. Merita più delle agiografie, delle biografie, delle scontate raccolte di canzoni rimasterizzate e reimpacchettate. Merita soprattutto di sfuggire all'aneddotica prêt à porter cui vengono fatalmente adattate le figure dei grandi artisti quando non sono più in grado di confutare o di precisare. Quando gli amici, i compagni di strada, quelli che sanno, che hanno visto, quelli che c'erano, si moltiplicano a dismisura.
  • Nel corso della mia carriera mi sono confrontato sin dall'inizio con i repertori altrui. Perché trovo ci sia molto da imparare, specie da maestri del calibro di Fabrizio De André e Giorgio Gaber. Rileggere le loro opere non significa solo condividere qualcosa che si trova esteticamente valido, ma anche dell'arte che si considera fondamentale da un punto di vista etico. [...] Perché parliamo di autori che hanno messo spessore in quanto hanno fatto, hanno speso idee, hanno formulato proposte interessanti anche politicamente, ideologicamente, filosoficamente.
  • Morgan, quoted in Morgan, L'eredità che non c'è; in Andrea Pedrinelli (editor), Gaber, Giorgio, il Signor G. Raccontato da intellettuali, amici, artisti, Kowalski, Milano, 2008 (pp. 101-102). ISBN 978-88-7496-754-4.
  • Oggigiorno la superficialità globalizzata tocca anche l'arte e la musica. Uno come Fabrizio De André, secondo questa logica, diventa un simbolo più da esporre che da capire.
  • Questo è il punto: lui era l'unico poeta della canzone d'autore. Gli altri, me compreso, con l'eccezione forse di Guccini, sono bravi, non poeti. E i suoi testi sono gli unici che reggono anche senza musica. [...] Non è assolutamente per tutti. Il suo era un elitarismo culturale. Aveva il fisico e la testa del poeta. Non aveva bisogno di mettersi in una torre d'avorio: in quella torre ci era nato.
  • Se non avessi conosciuto le canzoni di Fabrizio, non avrei mai cominciato a scrivere le mie.
  • Francesco De Gregori, quoted in Cesare G. Romana, Amico fragile. Fabrizio De André, Sperling & Kupfer, 1999, p. 99.
  • Si dice che Fabrizio sia il Dylan italiano, perché non dire che Dylan è il Fabrizio americano?
  • [Confrontando De André con Giorgio Gaber] Si sente insomma che Gaber era attore: viveva quanto cantava mettendo in gioco una carica emotiva che in De André non c'è. De André rimane neutrale, racconta, quasi non interpreta. Dipende molto anche dalle diverse dinamiche del loro canto: quella di Fabrizio era monocorde, e questo implica che ascoltarlo sia quasi come leggere un testo scritto. Quanto lui canta ti arriva in sé: come se - paradossalmente - non ci fosse chi te lo sta passando. Gaber invece è il contrario. Si avverte quanto egli metta in gioco il suo essere umano. Prende il tema e lo racconta dal suo punto di vista, ti dà una vera interpretazione. Però avevano in comune una caratteristica bellissima: non hanno mai sposato una parte politica. Hanno costruito un pensiero libero, da anarchici libertari, direi. Che poi declinavano musicalmente in modo, anche qui, diversissimo: De André con i due riferimenti della canzone medievale, all'inizio della carriera, e poi della canzone etnica; Gaber in modo molto più ampio. [...] Confrontarsi con loro è insomma interessante da ogni punto di vista, oltre che necessario. Il problema è che se mi chiedete quale eredità hanno lasciato ai cantautori di oggi, io temo di dover rispondere che gli artisti della mia generazione non hanno imparato niente da loro.
  • Morgan, L'eredità che non c'è; in Andrea Pedrinelli (editor), Gaber, Giorgio, il Signor G. Raccontato da intellettuali, amici, artisti, Kowalski, Milano, 2008 (p. 102). ISBN 978-88-7496-754-4.
  • Una delle grandi qualità di Fabrizio è che non è mai stato moralista, non ha mai apprezzato il perbenismo e ha sempre cercato di capire le debolezze umane. E poi la pietas umana, che era per lui un elemento essenziale per conoscere il prossimo, e che è sempre stata al centro della sua poetica. Fabrizio è anche stato sempre molto coerente.
  • Dori Ghezzi, quoted in Corriere della Sera, 23 febbraio 2010.

Bibliography

[edit]
  • Fabrizio De André, Sotto le ciglia chissà. I diari, Mondadori, Milano, 2016. ISBN 978-88-04-65821-4
  • Fabrizio De André, Una goccia di splendore. Un'autobiografia per parole e immagini, Guido Harari (editor), Rizzoli, 2007. ISBN 978-88-17-01166-2
  • Roberto Cotroneo (editor), Come un'anomalia, in Parole e canzoni, Einaudi, Torino, 1999. ISBN 88-06-15306-4
  • Cesare G. Romana (editor), Amico fragile. Fabrizio De André, Sperling & Kupfer, 1999. ISBN 88-200-1214-6
  • Patrizia Traverso e Stefano Tettamanti, Genova è mia moglie. La città di Fabrizio De André, Rizzoli, Milano, 2017. ISBN 978-88-17-09802-1
  • Luigi Viva, Non per un dio ma nemmeno per gioco. Vita di Fabrizio De André, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-81580-X
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