(Turin, 1935 – 2025)
If you didn’t Know Him… (by Carlo Pestelli, Independet Scholar)
(Originally published in Italian on ANPINICOLAGROSA)
On October 30, 2012, Fausto Amodei performed his last “official” live concert at the Sala Patrizia Cerutti Bresso in Pinerolo. Organized by the local Music Academy, the concert was based on the repertoire of George Brassens—so no original songs, no “Il tarlo” or “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia,” but instead many dizzying rhymes and lexical acrobatics, in strict adherence to Brassens’s meter. In Italian and Torinese dialect, Fausto’s translations are both an act of love and a testament to his fidelity to the source text. A prime example of this is the dialectal translation of “La marche nuptiale,” namely “ La marcia ‘d nòsse ,” in which the two main characters—the bride and groom, parents of the singer-narrator—get married at City Hall, just as in the original. I emphasize this because, in contrast, Fabrizio De Andrè (“Marcia nuziale,” Volume 1, 1970) abandons the secular nature of the ceremony and, betraying Brassens’s perspective, decides to have the couple marry in a church. Perhaps the great Genoese artist wished belatedly to repay a debt to the Catholic Radio Maria, which—unlike the bigoted state-run RAI controlled by the Christian Democrats—broadcast his songs early in his career? Digressions aside, here are all three examples of the verse in question.
Brassens:
Quand même je vivrai jusqu’à la fin des temps / Je garderais toujours le souvenir content / du jour de pauvre noce où mon père et ma mère / s’allèrent épouser devant Monsieur le Maire.
(Even if I live until the end of time / I will always cherish the happy memory / of that humble wedding day when my father and mother / went to get married before the mayor.)
Amodei:
Vivèissa pura fin-a sent’ani e pì an là / a-i é n’arcòrd che mi i l’avrai mai dësmentià: / a l’é col ëd le pòvre nòsse, cand mè pare e mia mare / as son marià an Comun, con sindich e fanfare.
(Even if I live to be a hundred and beyond / there’s one memory I’ll never forget: / it’s that of our humble wedding, when my father and my mother / got married at City Hall, with the mayor and a brass band.)
De Andrè:
Ma pure se vivrò fino alla fine del tempo / Io sempre serberò il ricordo contento delle povere nozze / di mio padre e mia madre / decisi a regolare il loro amore sull’altare.
(But even if I live until the end of time / I will always cherish the happy memory of the humble wedding / of my father and mother / who decided to seal their love at the altar.)
Fausto was somewhat critical of De André’s translations, precisely because the “translator-traitor” axiom did not apply to him (Brassens even more so than Fausto). Speaking of famous disciples and colleagues, Fausto always maintained excellent relations—albeit very sporadic—with Francesco Guccini and Claudio Lolli, while there was some professional friction with his former friend Gipo Farassino (precisely due to Gipo’s misappropriation of Amodei’s translations), which, however, did not prevent Fausto from paying his respects to the Turin-born singer-songwriter’s remains at the Teatro Carignano, where the funeral chapel was set up (December 2013). Among artists still active today, Stefano Bollani is certainly a great admirer of Fausto, as well as an excellent performer of his songs, but I have also been a casual witness to Fausto’s encounters with Frankie Hi-Nrg (in Rivoli, at Maison Musique… I no longer recall what year) and, above all, with Vinicio Capossela (in Dogliani, for the TV festival in 2024).
The aforementioned Pinerolo show also had a title: All the Languages of Brassens. For the occasion, I took the liberty of informing Luca Rastello, a great and sincere admirer of Fausto, that this concert might end up being his last official public appearance; Luca sensed its importance and published a full-page article previewing the evening in the pages of La Repubblica-Torino. For me, playing with him that evening, it was an opportunity to accompany Fausto with additional translations into other languages, such as English and German, and in particular Spanish and Catalan (the translations of Brassens into Spanish and Catalan by Pierre Pascal—for the vocals of the famous Paco Ibañez—and by Miquel Pujadó, respectively, are very famous and very well done).
But let’s take a step back: years earlier, in 1991, it was in Turin that I first heard Fausto play and sing live, and the occasion was once again connected to Brassens, on the tenth anniversary of his death. In fact, the Centre culturel français on Via Pomba organized a recital for the occasion in which Fausto paid tribute to the master by singing his most famous songs; he added some of his own translations to the setlist, and if I recall correctly, at the insistence of the audience clamoring for one of his own songs, he slipped “Il povero Elia,” a gem from Fausto’s early days, into the encores. Among the large audience was the other great Brassens disciple, Nanni Svampa, who had come all the way from Milan specifically for the event. In attendance as well was music critic Gabriele Ferraris, who reviewed the concert, but there was also a gentleman at the entrance who feared he wouldn’t be let in because of the large crowd: he had come from Bardonecchia and was arguing with the organizers, pointing out that he had traveled all the way from outside Turin specifically for the event. No less frightened by the crowd at the entrance, I remember a lady who, shouting loudly not to push, pointed out that she was the widow of one of the victims of the Statuto cinema fire. And I remember some very young people—I certainly wasn’t the only eighteen-year-old: the person sitting next to me, roughly my age, had a portable tape recorder to capture the rare concert on cassette (back then they were still called concerts, not events). I have kept the invitation from that afternoon, from that performance in a venue so ill-suited to the large number of people, and I managed to have it reproduced in the booklet accompanying the recent Oiseaux de passage, a 2023 album released by the tireless Valter Colle, Fausto’s friend and publisher. The album serves as a sort of conclusion to a previous, similar work. In 2020, also with the label Nota, the first and far more substantial collection of Brassens translations—those completed up to 1990—was released; it is a rudimentary recording, a first take, from many years later (essentially the digitization of a home recording on DAT dating back to the early 1990s, which took place—as Fausto told me—at the home of his friend Alberto Cesa), but perhaps all the more precious for its very rustic spontaneity. From 1990 onward, in addition to writing a few more songs Fausto sporadically ventured into exploring other obscure repertoires—I’m thinking of Father Ignazio Isler (about whom, were it not for Fausto, no one would know anything). The spirit of Georges continues to linger in the Amodei household, and from time to time, since 1990, that ghost must have put his foot down to demand further translations—still boldly faithful to the original, perfectly superimposable in terms of rhythmic and metrical precision.
I had known Fausto for over thirty years, and when he passed away suddenly in September 2025—while he was in the hospital dealing with his wife Gabriella’s health issues—I didn’t immediately realize, upon hearing the sad news, that the next day I would wake up in a world, a city, without Fausto. It had never been, and I believe it never will be, so easy and natural for me to keep in touch with a friend so effortlessly; there was indeed a forty-year age gap, but it made no difference to me compared to friendships with me peers or those younger than me. Fausto was always there. Once, around the Christmas holidays, I emailed him my best wishes, asking what he planned to do during the short break, if he was thinking of traveling or anything else. This was his reply (email dated 12/20/2008): “We [Gabriella and Fausto] will almost certainly stay in Turin, partly because there are two meters of snow in Rorà (I found out today), and even though we have snowshoes, age and laziness dampen any desire for an Arctic adventure.” A prime example of his proverbial self-deprecating humor. Another more recent email concluded with the following farewell: “go well of body,” enclosing the translation in parentheses (va bene di corpo). Nothing vulgar or scatological, mind you, but simply an original way to sign off on an email that was playful from the very start:
Carocarlo (it sounds good, even as the objectified infinitive of the verb “carocare”).
His humor would also catch his interlocutors off guard in official settings, as was the case with the unwary host of a provincial Festival dell’Unità, who, in introducing the architect-singer-songwriter about to perform to a large audience—perhaps out of excitement or, in any case, at the mercy of an excess of treacherous enthusiasm—put it this way: “Comrades, here is Fausto Amodei, who made the Dead of Reggio Emilia.’” But Fausto promptly replied: “No, wait! Tambroni did that. I only wrote ‘For the Dead of Reggio Emilia….’”
When I lived in Spain twenty years ago, I managed to get the Italian Cultural Center to invite him for a series of concerts at the universities of Seville, Córdoba, and Granada; it was 2004. He arrived with his ever-present guitar and performed for a curious young audience. He always ended his concerts with “Il giorno dell’uguaglianza” (“Ci sveglieremo un mattino diverso da tanti / e sentiremo un silenzio mai prima ascoltato….” [“We’ll wake up one morning different from so many others / and hear a silence never heard before…”]), a song from 1963 that he never played in Turin. The lyrics contain some of the key concepts that John Lennon would later distill into “Imagine.”
Non ci saranno più martiri, boia e tiranni,
saremo tutti un po’ santi ed un po’ peccatori;
non ci sarà più, per molte migliaia di anni,
gente che voglia atteggiarsi a nostri tutori.
Scompariranno i soldati ed i generali,
scompariranno scomuniche, preti e censori,
diventeremo un pianeta di esseri uguali
dove ciascuno ha rispetto degli altri e di sé.
(There will be no more martyrs, executioners, or tyrants,
we’ll all be a little bit saints and a little bit sinners;
for many thousands of years to come,
people who want to act as our guardians.
Soldiers and generals will disappear,
excommunications, priests, and censors will vanish, we will become a planet of equal beings
where everyone respects others and themselves.)
Years earlier, back in 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Liberation Day, we put together a recital of partisan songs. We performed a dozen times over the course of three months, between April and June. Our debut took place in the small auditorium of the Jewish community center in Turin, in defiance of every safety regulation: I remember a packed hall, with many people standing as well. Two other notable performances took place in Boves on April 25 and on May 1 in Turin, in Piazza San Carlo. Boves is the “Vendée of the Resistance,” so singing that repertoire in front of gray-haired partisans at the end of the long lunch organized by the local ANPI was truly exhilarating. Naturally, the crowd asked Fausto for an encore of “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia,” and just as naturally, Fausto obliged. In Turin, however, a few days later, the atmosphere was entirely different. The May Day concert in Piazza San Carlo serves as the culmination of a long parade and takes place after the speech by the union leader on duty—a speech not always followed closely by at least half of the human procession that continues to pour into the square from Via Roma. Added to this is the fact that, unfortunately, even back then, the final phase of the local May Day parade would often devolve into clashes between riot police and certain fringe groups of demonstrators. As far as I can recall, it was precisely that year—during Valentino Castellani’s mayoral term—that Turin would make headlines for its May 1st clashes. In particular, from that May 1, 1995, I remember two really pissed-off demonstrators storming angrily onto the stage: perhaps they wanted to address the crowd using the official microphone and throw the speaker schedule into disarray. I don’t know… I know that Fausto and I were about to start, but unlike the intimate concert on April 25th, the sense of awkwardness and tension was palpable, even if Fausto didn’t let it show. Just before launching into the first song, we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of those two indignant protesters, who were soon peacefully escorted away by CGIL union representative Gianpiero Carpo. Aside from the two customary events on April 25 and May 1, that “Resistance” tour took place in the auditoriums of Turin’s high schools, from the Volta and Gioberti high schools to the arts high school, as well as the well-known Amedeo Avogadro vocational school. Recruitment happened by word of mouth: we’d perform at one school, and someone would tell a student at another school, who’d ask the teachers to invite us, and so on. In reality, we took ourselves pretty seriously. Fausto was a stickler and would never have put together a setlist for the occasionwithout the scrutiny of a careful chronological and philological selection. In the preliminary meetings, he was in fact very clear: the first three indispensable songs to be perfected were: “Strofette di Regina Coeli,” “Dongo,” and “Festa d’aprile.” The first is a broad and highly ironic chronicle of the period after July 25, 1943, written by Franco Antonicelli, set to the tune of the Roman folk song “Sor Capanna.” The second is the archetype of the popular leaflet-song, circulated at the time the events took place, with a specific narrative focus on the arrest of Il Duce (“his fateful capture”). With “Festa d’aprile” (a retrospective song from 1948), the passing of the torch takes place between the “elder partisan brothers” (an exemplary song by Michele L. Straniero set to music by Amodei) and the members of Cantacronache, because the lyrics by Antonicelli, former President of the CLN-AI, were set to music by a young Sergio Liberovici, who was the founder and musical soul of Cantacronache. The piece is a reworking of the folk songs broadcast by Radio Libertà in Biella, the only radio station run by partisans and aimed at a public audience.
How many things did Fausto Amodei accomplish in his long life? A great many. After earning his degree in architecture, he spent a year in Finland specializing under a famous Finnish architect—and those were certainly not (or not yet) the years when it was common to spend a year abroad after completing one’s “standard” studies. He was also a member of parliament for the PSIUP (a recurring joke embedded in the acronym: a party dissolved in an afternoon), which earned him the nickname “the seven-string deputy”; the seventh string was actually his surname, which begins with “A” (those were the years when the weighted voting system was in use, and generally the the first two or three names on the candidate list got preference). Had he been named Omodei or, worse, Umodei, he would not have been elected. Instead, he went to Rome to serve as a deputy (from 1968 to 1972) with all the dedication he could muster and, as luck would have it, in a far more reformist legislature than usual (Workers’ Statute, approval of divorce and the first tax reform, institutionalization of the regions, etc.). In this case, Amodei joined the Public Works Committee. At the time, he was already well-known as a musician. In fact, after the Cantacronache project ended in 1962, he joined the Milan-based Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano alongside Michele Straniero. In addition to his own songs, he set others’ lyrics to music, played the guitar, and recorded folk songs. Even in that case, his approach was rigorous, as well as productive, so to speak. The very first recording of “Bella ciao” is credited to him; he arranged it and sang it as a duet with Sandra Mantovani. Similarly, not everyone knows that he was also behind the popularity of “Addio Lugano,” a song he recorded after collecting it from an anarchist barber in Ivrea.
More than once, Fausto confided in me that if it hadn’t been for his friend Sergio Liberovici, he would have been nothing but an architect—and that speaks volumes about how artistically influential Liberovici was within Cantacronache; probably just as much as the charismatic Michele Straniero who served as a fluid link between the group’s various factions. What is even more certain is that, struck by Brassens’s records, the young Amodei set aside the piano to throw himself into learning the guitar and giving it a try himself. In this sense, Fausto’s case is unique, as he is a singer-songwriter who, unlike most of his peers, did not approach the instrument by learning the handful of chords necessary to accompany himself, but rather transposed onto the six strings a harmonic-melodic complexity derived from his dexterity on the piano and an eye trained in reading sheet music. Try it for yourself: songs like “Il ratto della chitarra” or the well-known (and over-covered) “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia” have never been heard reproduced by anyone quite like the songwriter, while it is far easier—and more common—to hear them mangled by the many who have tried, stumbling over some inevitable inaccuracies. The interweaving of chords and appoggiaturas and the inevitable diminished chords that punctuate the scores of Fausto’s songs can only be explained by taking his classical background into account. To cite just a couple of examples, the sources of inspiration for the aforementioned “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia” and for “Il tarlo” can in fact be traced back to Mussorgsky and an aria from La Bohème, respectively. Fausto the guitarist was therefore not merely putting on a show; the fact is that he could not have played any other way, because the technical foundation from which he began and produced his work was not that of all the other singer-songwriters. Giovanna Marini herself, who also perfected her guitar studies with Segovia, expressed affectionate irony, as well as sincere admiration, regarding the complexity of the guitar in Fausto’s songs.
In general, Amodei had a distinctly Savoyard reverence for a job well done, because otherwise it just wouldn’t have been like him. Whether it was a project for the architectural collective, preparing for a concert, organizing a birthday party or a trip to the mountains, things had to be done properly. Of course he listened to a lot of music: he had season tickets to the Unione Musicale concerts and frequented the Auditorium on Via Rossini for RAI concerts; he also loved jazz and blues, just as he greatly admired Inti-Illimani or the great English guitarist John Renbourn, with whom he shared the stage in Rome for the 30th-anniversary concert of Cesaroni’s Folk Studio (in 1992). When he hosted friends for dinner, he uncorked carefully selected wines, while for daily consumption there was always a bottle of Grignolino on the wine rack. He rarely spoke of the past; sometimes he received records from singer-songwriters—admirers hoping for his opinion—and in his little free time, if he wasn’t reading a book, he played the piano or sat at the computer. His relationship with technology was never that of a backward-looking humanist uncomfortable with computers; on the contrary, he effortlessly downloaded software for composing and recording music and was always up to date with the latest versions of writing programs. He also generously made time for journalists and fans of all ages who, from time to time, came to meet him at his home on Via Vincenzo Monti—a first-floor apartment filled with books (far more than records) and paintings, among which two portraits painted by admirer-artists stood out. He kept them in his study, side by side: the earlier one, in which Fausto appears beardless, is by Gianni Colombo, while the second, a marvelous example of pop art, is by Nino Aimone and dates back to 1967.
In 1992, Fausto received an unexpected phone call from composer Luciano Berio. Berio asked him if, for Umberto Eco’s sixtieth birthday, he could kindly transform himself into a living gift. That’s right: for his sixtieth birthday, Eco organized a big party, and his friend Berio wanted to show up with Fausto as a gift. Fausto agreed and, for the occasion, composed a long and hilarious tautogram using the letter ‘s’ (I’ll quote at random a snippet I memorized from the only reading he gave me of it afterward: sliding sexually: do you sempiternally shake the sheets? If so, often? and then, referring to his Minerva column in L’Espresso: weekly you know how to scribble savory little sketches…etc.) and he presented himself to the birthday boy wrapped entirely in a huge bow. The surprise was a huge success: the two hadn’t seen each other in decades and, as Berio recounted, Umberto Eco was a bit moved.
Another phone call, however, led to what was most likely the only song he ever wrote on commission. The producer of a sweet wine contacted him and asked him to compose a song to be sung in the vineyards during the grape harvest. “Would you accept, Maestro?” “Gladly,” Fausto replied. “Ah, good! And how much would it cost me?” “Ah, nothing,”Fausto replied, quite amused by the unusual request. “No money; I’d prefer to be paid in wine.” “Deal.” The mission was clear: not just, or not primarily, a generic song with wine as its theme, but a ballad—preferably somewhat rhythmic and catchy—to be sung in the vineyards during the grape harvest, a task notoriously requiring a strong, resilient backbone. And where does the philologist Fausto begin? With Noah, on Mount Ararat, composing a ballad with a verbose text, eight stanzas full of chords, diminished chords, appoggiaturas, and inversions—enough to give even the best guitarists a headache. The chorus was cheerful: “I’m a winemaker, you’re a winemaker / if the grapes are good, the wine is good / come, come, come, little brunette, come and harvest.” And so went the first stanza: “To the health of Noah, the great and illustrious patriarch / whom the Bible says was the first to plant vineyards / and he did not even eat the grapes in secret / but gathered them and crushed them to make the must.” Even more recognizably Amodeian (due to its chronicle-like influence) is the final verse: “Let Craxi and Jervolino ban whatever they want, but let it not occur to them to condemn wine. / If, by misfortune, that should happen and they get their way, let a modest amount be at least a keg.” That was Fausto: he expressed himself through song; it came easily to him, thanks to a solid and well-established technique as a versifier, always ready with a clever turn of phrase and some brilliant, unexpected, and unpredictable rhymes up his sleeve. Was his daughter getting married or was his dog dying? He’d write a song about it, and as for his vast repertoire, even for those who followed him assiduously, it would be impossible to compile systematically his entire body of work—and this is because, on closer inspection, Fausto did indeed have a French sensibility, but the fire that animated him from within was that of an inexhaustible nomad without borders, a traveler in the style of Salgari, the kind who writes songs even on bar napkins or the back of doctor’s prescriptions. And I always thought that this musical wanderer, though he traveled more with his imagination than with a suitcase, was so cheerful and communicative because, deep down, he was doing what interested him.
The first song he taught me—if this memory is worth anything—wasn’t one of his own, nor one by Brassens or Boris Vian (oh, and Fausto also translated some of Vian’s songs… Oh my God, nobody knows that: where can I find them now?). The first—actually, the first two songs he taught me—were “The House of the Rising Sun” and “Follia.” The first is “The House of the Rising Sun,” and that’s fine; the second is a hilarious apocryphal vaudeville tune, featuring as its hapless protagonist a young painter who arrived in Rome with his artistic dreams and was soon reduced to poverty by Ivana, a femme fatal and deceitful model. It’s a hilarious sketch-like song, an operatic parody in both language and singing style, and I never found out where he dug it up. After all, Fausto—and this is worth mentioning too—had a sticker on his guitar bearing the following inscription: “I was picked up by Pete Seeger,” since in June 1993 the bard of the American protest song played in Turin, where he arrived without a guitar (lost along with his luggage at the airport), so the organizer Franco Lucà turned to Fausto to borrow one. Honored to be of service to such a great artist, Fausto was also creative in securing the only autograph of his life, by applying a sticker to his guitar strap bearing the aforementioned inscription and leaving a space blank for the signature of the person who borrowed it.
One more thing: I know for a fact—I remember it clearly—that the first time (in the summer of 1991) I heard Fausto’s voice playing on an old LP at a friend’s house, it was in the song “Se non li conoscete.” I don’t know who put the record on; I imagine it was my friend Caterina; we were at her place. And we were a small group of twenty-somethings, all students between high school graduation and college, and Fausto Amodei—a colleague of Caterina’s father who was also an architect—was a complete stranger to all of us. The song left us speechless, caught between giggles of wonder and disbelief. That evening, we wanted to listen to it at least three more times. Over the years, I’ve played with many people and often shared my passion for Fausto’s repertoire with folks who might have known him only by reputation, or with musician friends like Filippo Gambetta, in the past, and more recently Federico Bagnasco and Vincent Boniface. On the faces of these talented musicians I have always seen the same amazement, the same admiration that I personally felt many years ago, when I happened to hear “Se non liconoscete” for the first time at a friend’s house.
This song was composed during the war, after Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed the armistice with the allies and fled with the royal family to Brindisi, a secure port under the allies’ control. Scorchingly satyrical, “La Badoglieide”–whose title mockingly echoes worthier epics such as the The Aeneid (L’Eneide) or The Iliad (L’Iliade)–was recorded over the years by several anti-fascist and anti-monarchic singers. Among them, were Fausto Amodei and Michele L. Straniero, who were active (Amodei still is) as songwriters, left-wing activists and ethnomusicologists.Curiously, however, during the period 1944-1945, this song was also sung by fascist groups who had reasons to voice their anti-Savoy and anti-Badoglio feelings because King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshall Pietro Badoglio had turned their backs to Mussolini and sided with the allies on September 8th, 1943, opening a rift in the country and the way to the Liberation. More details can be found on Atiwarsong.com.