Francesco De Gregori
Alice Non Lo Sa

THE REVIEW

When the voices in my head become louder than the thoughts, I have no choice but to escape to Abruzzo to vent my anger on an old billiard table with holes that are too narrow and with some slopes. There, I don't have to worry about who owns a gun, but only about who doesn't. Abruzzo is wild, untamed, just like De Gregori in 1973, the De Gregori of his twenties.

I ask that De Gregori for everything I can every time he passes by here, but he never answers... not for anything, but he already announces it from the title that he has no good answers. I turn this cover in my hands and it seems as beautiful as a soldier frightened by the trench and bored by the rear of any war, with the uniform dirty with soil and the buttons randomly placed. He has a face, he has words that cheat time, that cheat the senses.

The memory of when I began to love him flees into my childhood and suddenly vanishes. I clearly remember never grasping the meaning of his words, elusive like thoughts, and never even trying. I remember the cover of Scacchi e Tarocchi among my father's collection, but what does it matter? What matters is the dialogue: put this record on and people go silent, listen as if they are weighing the words that De Gregori sings. You struggle to understand, but all that comes to you is, once again, an Alice doesn't know.

I have lost this record, physically three times, and I have gotten lost in it every time. It is an escape, nothing else, it is my madeleine, leading to a past never left too aside, towards journeys with the windows down, towards strange horizons and drunkenness with fading tones, and considering that when time deprives me of hair, beer, and youth, and Jazz still won't be for me, this record will still be there and will surely have risen... it will be a madeleine as big as a pizza, and now tell me... Buonanotte Fratello.