Ennio Morricone
Bianco, Rosso e Verdone

Italy was becoming particularly grotesque on the brink of the eighties. The one that was recounted to us by our grandparents or by the (supreme) various novelists like Silone, Alvaro, Levi had faded roughly by 1950. The Italian peninsula was neurotic and compulsive, afflicted by trivial knowledge and habit, as it stood on the threshold of the last “twenty years” of the 20th century that shaped the known world of ancient history. A last-stage genuineness came to mind as I browsed through the family album. We were like that, forerunners of what we are today. The Americanization of the country was about to reach its peak, and the general stupor had already begun back then. We stood impotently before the advancing progress, which in Italy, depending on how you look at it, had stopped years? decades? centuries? earlier.

How were we?

Regardless of personal tastes, Verdone’s film captures well three Italian psycho-types of the era that you will surely know very well. But what interested me about that film was not so much the intertwining of the three stories as another level of storytelling. Deeper and underlying, although it emerged on an audio level perfectly. Ennio Morricone was, as always, brilliant in recreating the objects and environments that Italy was immersed in. Musical locales that make the footage redundant. The flashy German crossing the Brenner Pass, the Roman rightly far from his city, the Capitolian who brings a piece of Rome back home using a car. It doesn’t matter if it’s a station wagon, sports car, or economy car. They use the car. The tracks “Bianco rosso e verdone” or “Autostrada” with the variations of themes are the car and what happens inside. A score construction that materializes the footage.

Try listening to them without watching the scenes, when you have a moment of calm. That choked attack with the Italian national anthem is the driver’s seat, deformed by the brand of the buttocks of those who, when they sit behind the wheel, feel that piece of Mirafiori’s production is a prosthetic extension of their body and being. A vaguely dreamlike atmosphere based on a melody that recalls Brazil of the '60s. Sleepy marching tunes for the heavier ones, putting the paranoid into overthinking. They can make you fall asleep at the wheel or blind those who drive straight. But they magically manage to accompany Italians home on the highway while contemplating the thousand issues to resolve. No one would know how they arrived safe (or not) and sound (or not) at home, but yet there they are.

It feels like stepping down a social rung when listening instead to “Marcetta popolare” or “Un povero emigrante” (always with variations on the theme), naive compositions with nods to the melted national anthem. Those who drive happy and confident are probably unaware they’re a cog in the national system that could have been lost. It certainly makes you think that the mechanism, in the absence of a single piece, wouldn’t have stopped and would have eliminated the damage, despising it. Yet, spear in hand and backpack on, everyone sits rigidly up straight in the 90° driver’s seat while family, friends, and objects can freely play, sing, discuss, or rest along the arteries that carry an almost-not-globalized humanity, around the territory to breathe life into the electoral ballots. Which could very well have been something else.

Abstracting the tracks from the film context and applying them to other potential slices of life, the discourse doesn’t change. Morricone is capable of narrating the careless Italianity of those years with sounds that suit great social and situational categories, covering the wide range of carelessness and inconsistency of that era. The “Temi d’amore” that run the length of the soundtrack are sweet and never shameless, underscoring the peninsular passion and ars amandi. Starting with the man who wants to dominate but conquers with glances and sweet words, ready to do anything in bed. But also from the woman who has to extract sex from the bigot. Embracing goose feather mattress violins cradle the desire and passion still linked to the “Cappello delle 23” and give a sense of composed eroticism. Typical of a country so controlled in manners by the Church yet eager to open up, beginning with the blouse to gradually remove all attire. Not in haste, but with a slightly burlesque manner.

Morricone narrates through notes the end of the sweet life and the muted beginning of a deadly era. Nostalgia and bitterness of the traveler, who only at the end discovers who they are and what they suffer from, could not stop today before all the cages and grids imposed on us. Hidden speed cameras, unexpected limits, hefty fines are the price paid by people who know well within themselves that life is a moment full of years wasted or well spent, in a place some stubbornly call the Bel Paese.