by Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown University).
To Italians, Sunday is more than just a day of rest: it can be the day of the soccer match, perhaps experienced with discomfort by those who are left at home as Rita Pavone sings in La partita di pallone; or with the serenity of those who go to the dance hall in a Gilera motorbike to have fun and meet girls (Menica menica by Bruno Lauzi!); it can be the occasion for a trip out of town with your girlfriend, in a bucolic enchantment that suspends the routine of the big city (as in Domenica bestiale by Fabio Concato); or a moment of adolescent anguish as for the protagonist of Buona domenica by Antonello Venditti. But even once one has grown up, the Lord’s day can bring conflicting feelings, and it happens in Sempre di domenica by Daniele Silvestri. And if Subsonica outline a relaxed mood Di domenica, with a serene dialogue about “changes in feelings,” Vasco Rossi in Domenica lunatica blames a mistake partly on himself and partly on “hypocrisy, melancholy, boredom that takes hold of us and never goes away.” Instead, Diamante, written by Francesco De Gregori for Zucchero Fornaciari, evokes an ancient Sunday, of innocent games in the countryside, in which one can imagine that the soldiers return to embrace their wives. Lucio Dalla suffered Sunday, as a “stupid day,” without his love, in the summer heat of the city, but “in [his] heart it snows,” just like in Domenica by Tiromancino, who recall the 80s together with Carlo Verdone and Claudia Gerini, “while outside the sun shines and inside it snows.”
In short, if in literature Giacomo Leopardi, in films John Travolta, and in songs Sergio Caputo had put the urge for Saturday, Sunday is instead the day of rest in the sense that the noise, the routine, the machine that distracts us from ourselves stop and we can enjoy a silence that sounds new to us. And in it we can remember, relive, but also hope for the future and find the impetus to plan it. For today, the last Sunday of May, I feel like Dalla: “I want to think only of you / of you who sleep on a cloud.”
(Washington, DC. April 23rd 2023)
