Francesco De Gregori
Un Guanto

THE REVIEW

I felt a funny and pleasant sensation. I felt like a boy about to take an exam, but happy because he's prepared and can show how good he is to an adult he likes.

-There's a very beautiful song by De Gregori: Un Guanto.

-I remember it. A hermetic song.

-It's inspired by some drawings by Max Klinger. It makes much more sense listening to it while looking at them. Paraphrase about finding a glove, I think that's what the cycle is called.

Gianrico Carofiglio, La regola dell’equilibrio, page 214, 2014, Einaudi

It seems that the first garment for the hand was an invention of the Nymphs.

To help Venus, wounded by a thorn bush, they supposedly stitched bandages around her fingers. The bandages become a glove, soothe the wound and become protection, challenge nature and turn into acquired power.

The glove, representation of a symbol and expression of a language of feelings, with Klinger becomes the story of a difficult, timeless and troubled love.

De Gregori picks up Klinger's glove in a challenge between the poetry of music and the poetry of images.

In an ice rink, elegant characters are depicted, greeting, smiling, and conversing with one another. The atmosphere is only seemingly serene: the windows of the building behind them are distorted, a little dog is tied to a chair, a young girl has fallen on the ground, close to a couple skating with their bodies leaning forward. Everything is in precarious balance. The skaters, the little dog, the woman who lost the glove, the man who wants to pick it up.

Like love makes us lose our mind, a man loses his hat.

Here starts the journey of the glove, from the real world to the dream world, where rooms no longer have walls, but infinite trees. A troubled love is like facing a stormy sea: imagination gallops towards the triumph of love. But man cannot govern love: precious as a pearl, he knows love is blind. And even when waves of passion bring flowers to its altar, love escapes.

And the dream can turn into a nightmare.

Love is not a trophy to hang on a wall. Unique and special, it cannot be protected from perils, for it may take flight in another direction and not be reached.

And to love and its sorrows
The glove had already settled
In that infinite frame
Where Psyche and Cupid govern together
Where Psyche and Cupid smile together"

As Prospero said in The Tempest, we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

The challenge between music and images uniting in matrimony is the happy ending.