Antonello Venditti
Centocittà

THE REVIEW

Second live, excluding the one from 1974 with Monti, Dalla, and De Gregori, "Centocittà" represents one of the best live performances of the Roman singer-songwriter. 17 tracks on the LP edition, 14 in the 1987 version as a single CD, the title is given by the launch single, the only one recorded in the studio. It presents itself as a declared follow-up to "Ci vorrebbe un amico", as some verses suggest: "io che cercavo un amico, guarda quanti ce ne ho, ma per un cuore ferito questo non basta, no". In fact, the related video also recaptures some moments from the video of the 1984 song from the album "Cuore". Among the recurring elements, the red car, the same evocatively depicted both on the cover and the back, but also the woman from the video (an alter ego of Simona Izzo?). "Centocittà" will be Venditti's last live album in which the man with Ray Bans gives more space to pieces from the '70s. To listen to pieces from the decade again, especially those from the political-social stream, it will take almost thirty years ("70.80 Ritorno al futuro", 2014). The first of the four sides presents, in addition to the launch track, "Sotto il segno dei pesci", "Giulia" and "Piero e Cinzia", thus highlighting the work of 1978. The second side instead presents earlier pieces, namely "Il treno delle sette" and "Le tue mani su di me", but also two tracks from three years earlier "Sotto la pioggia", which are "Le ragazze di Monaco" and "Stukas". An album that over the years will be almost forgotten by Antonello in live performances. The first side of the second vinyl is perhaps the best, with the "gem" of 1975 "Attila e la stella", his debut song, "Sora Rosa", but also "Marta", from "Quando verrà Natale", and finally the legendary "Compagno di scuola", a beautiful picture of the author's high school experience that became so for many students. The last side (and it's nice to see how albums were conceived in the days of Long Play...) that proceeds along the path of the magnificent '70s, with the tracks "Le cose della vita", the committed "Campo de' Fiori", and "Penna a sfera", where Antonello Venditti updates the verses to the ongoing decade, replacing "musical newspapers" with "national televisions" (a nod to Fininvest networks?), all before the grand finale with the song that ideally preceded "Centocittà", namely "Ci vorrebbe un amico", because the wave of success of the belonging album will last at least for the following year, although the author did not overindulge in this collection, in fact there are two of the eight tracks of the record, and the highly celebrated "Notte prima degli esami" is not present. Antonello (still) doles out the songs to insert, without revealing too much. To close the record, but it is only listenable on the vinyl edition, the instrumental coda of "Lo stambecco ferito", one of the best tracks of the entire career of the Folkstudio singer. My rating for this live testimony is 4 stars. Some tracks, already spine-chilling in the studio version, are even more highlighted here by the audience's voices at the opening and closing of the tracks and some adjustments that Antonello has included. In the CD version, "Stukas", which will increasingly disappear from the live repertoire in the following decades, "Campo de' Fiori", and indeed "Lo stambecco ferito", which will be revisited, entirely in its nearly 10-minute length, only in 2014, are removed. This disk turns 30 years old this year. A retrospective look at one of the greats of singer-songwriting, here still in form.