Antonello Venditti
Le cose della vita

After the promising debut of "Theorius Campus" in collaboration with De Gregori, and "L'orso bruno" from a few months earlier, Antonello Venditti, while continuing to draw inspiration from the Elton John of "Madman Across the Water," decides to steer towards more sparse and acoustic sounds, abandoning orchestral solutions. The result is an album of 8 tracks where Antonello on one hand refines his intimate poetics, while on the other continues on the path of commitment and the strong themes of those years.

"Mio padre ha un buco in gola" is dedicated to his father Vincenzo Italo, future deputy prefect of Rome, although the text also mentions the "professoressa madre" and the grandmother, concluding the scene with the story of the episode from which the song title originates, namely the wound his father received during World War II. The song symbolically kills the parents, seen as representatives of a now anachronistic traditionalist Italy.

After "Mariù," a song marked by a kind of clock and with slightly spicy lyrics, comes "Brucia Roma," one of the first songs the singer-songwriter dedicated to his city and also among the first inspired by Ancient Rome, as "Attila e la stella" will be in 1975. Menenius Agrippa and Tiberius Gracchus are invoked over Nero, perhaps also to speak about contemporary political figures, and moreover, the line "questo er professore nun me l'ha mai detto" seems to be a critique of scholastic rote learning that prevents a profound understanding of past History, and consequently, the present one. The song is in Romanesco dialect, and here Venditti highlights all the evocative power of this. Side A closes with the title track, "Le cose della vita," a masterpiece of the intimate Venditti and among the few songs from this period that will withstand concerts in the following decades. A track of not even three minutes in which the line "Le cose della vita fanno piangere i poeti, ma se non le fermi subito diventano segreti" is beautiful and, in hindsight, could also be interpreted maliciously regarding Venditti's conversion to a sentimentalism that would indeed find its manifestation in "Segreti".

We turn the vinyl, and we find a track already present in the previous "L'orso bruno," namely "E li ponti so' soli", a moving story of a homeless woman, also sung in Romanesco this time but played not with the piano but with the eminent, an organ of great instrumental value at the time and now almost untraceable. A few chords, and the magic of one of the most successful songs on the album is realized. After "L'ingresso della fabbrica," the talk of factories returns with "Il treno delle sette," where the line "libertà è una cosa grande libertà è una cosa sola" seems to anticipate by almost 40 years the line "la libertà ritornerà" from "E allora canta!". From the discomfort of workers in the '70s to that of university researchers in the 2010s. The piano work here is chilling, and as mentioned is inspired by the early Elton John (listen to "Il mare di Jan" from the previous album and note the evident reference to "Levon"). Freedom returns again in "Stupida signora," supported by a dramatic and successful sequence of piano chords, but this time freedom is "for those who want it." The text is cryptic and "il giornale del venerdì" could be interpreted as the supremacy of political commitment over feelings, exactly the opposite of what will happen from 1984 with "Cuore." This beautiful album concludes with "Le tue mani su di me", another gem of the intimate Venditti, with chords that would also be used for "Qui" eleven years later, and a truly successful text. A seamless Venditti, with tracks that are not long but manage, in a limited number of verses, to express all his poeticism. Up to achieving the minimalism of "Quando verrà Natale" from the self-titled album of the following year. 1973-1975: the best Venditti ever.