by Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown University).
The last Sanremo Festival saw Marco Mengoni as the winner with “Due vite”. A beautiful song and a great performer, which brings the palm of the winner back to a melodic context. If in previous editions the Festival had awarded artists such as Mahmood (2019) Diodato (2020) Maneskin (2021) and Mahmood e Blanco (2022), with a non-traditional singer-songwriter style that explored the new languages of music and performance, as well as themes never heard before on the stage of the Ariston theater.
Historically, however, singer-songwriters, especially of the first generations, had a conflictual relationship with Sanremo. It is true that some singer-songwriters won the Festival dei Fiori, as sanremo is nicknamed, (just to name a few: Sergio Endrigo in 1968, Riccardo Cocciante in 1991, Roberto Vecchioni in 2011, and many others), and one could even say that the term singer-songwriter was launched on the stage of the Casino of the Ligurian city (with “Volare” Domenico Modugno won the 1958 edition singing “with open wings”), there have been many tensions, sometimes even productive ones, between “the singer-songwriter” and the Festival. This 1985 interview by Enzo Biagi with Guccini, De André, Dalla and De Gregori is a testament to this.
But perhaps the breakup actually occurred on January 27, 1967, when Luigi Tenco took his own life after his song (“Ciao amore ciao,” sung with Dalida) was eliminated from the Festival. This tragedy was, in some obscure way, fundamental in the history of Italian song, as Marco Santoro reconstructs in Effetto Tenco (2010). The Genoese singer-songwriter was a key figure in the panorama of the nascent artistic category that today we call “cantautorato,” a pillar of the so-called “Genoese School.” His suicide prompted some of his friends to write touching songs, such as “Festival” by De Gregori (1976) and “Preghiera in gennaio” by De André, the first focusing on the victim and the opportunistic reaction of the media and the music industry, the second written shortly after the fact, tinged with mediated religious polemics through a poem by Francis Jammes (“Prière pour aller au paradis avec les ânes,” 1906) laterset to music by George Brassens (1953).
In the 70s and 80s, there was a clear distancing of Italian singer-songwriters from the Festival, for aesthetic, ideological, and perhaps even fashion reasons. Francesco Guccini, at minute -48’:40’’ of this TG1 RAI special from 1982 (but filmed on November 28, 1981) explains well why. The fact is that Sanremo—which “stabbed” Sergio Caputo on the radio, became in that period a refuge for melodists, traditionalists, and passéists, with little vitality or interest in experimentation or social issues.
Whether you like it or not, the Festival is today a rather interesting litmus test of the current mood in Italian music, and singers of every style, genre, extraction, and artistic background participate. The Festival strives to be, in short, a photograph of the beautiful country where ’l sì sona (the yes sounds). However blurry and imprecise, the “kermesse” of young and old who parade on stage presents a picture that tells us something about our country, its ambitions and hopes, its fears, and also its limits as well as its musical excellence (which sometimes remain hidden only in the incredibly professional and prepared orchestra pit). After all, if you don’t take it too seriously, watching the Sanremo Festival can be a lot of fun.
Below I propose a selection, completely arbitrary, of singer-songwriters who have participated and sometimes won the Festival over the years.
Domenico Modugno, “Nel blu dipinto di blu” 1958
Luigi Tenco “Ciao amore ciao” 1967
Lucio Dalla, “Piazza Grande” 1972
Grazia Di Michele, “Le ragazze di Gauguin” 1986
Luca Barbarossa, “Portami a ballare” 1992
Gerardina Trovato, “Ma non ho più la mia città” 1993
Carmen Consoli, “Amore di plastica” 1996 e “Confusa e felice” 1997
Elisa, “Luce” 2001
Daniele Silvestri, “Salirò” 2002
Roberto Vecchioni, “Chiamami ancora amore” 2011
Paola Turci “Fatti bella per te” 2017
(Washington DC, March 31, 2023)
