Francesco Guccini
L'isola non trovata

"It sometimes appears shrouded in mist, magical and beautiful, but if the pilot advances on mysterious seas, it has already flown away, tinged with blue, the color of distance..."

The attempt to grasp the meaning of life, the truth, through escaping into the mysterious, the irrational has always been Guccini's obsession, as it probably is for every thinking being that refuses to live solely as a consumer. But how many of us can express it with illuminating words like those that recur numerous times in Guccini's vast repertoire? I jot down the first phrases that come to mind:

"remain the timeless dreams, the impressions of a moment, the lights in the darkness of houses glimpsed from a train..."

"the true ambiguity is the life we live, the something we call being human..."

"if only the sirocco wind truly blew and arrived every day to push us to look beyond the overused face of things, into the dark labyrinths of houses..."

I quote three but I could find dozens, especially concentrated in this fundamental album of 1970, "The Unfound Island," fundamental if only because it's from this record onwards that Guccini seriously decided to pursue his artistic path. "The Unfound Island" is the symbol of the truth that eludes us, the continuous effort to reach it, naturally destined to remain in vain, but at the same time a reason for living. The song is strangely split into two sections, one at the beginning and one at the end of the album; personally, I prefer it whole, as it is in the double "live" album "Fra la Via Emilia e il West," but this does not diminish in the slightest the beauty of the words and their profound meaning. Also, a large part of the other songs have the search for truth as a central theme, a search attempted in the most varied ways: one can be the wisdom mixed with drunkenness of a character who really existed in the place of Pavana, "Il Frate," a cultured and spiritual person who, nonetheless, lived "dressed in rags and strangeness" in a village where he was somewhat the village fool, yet at the same time "spoke of God and Schopenhauer," to the point that even Guccini himself admits having serious doubts about who among the two of them understood life. An indelible character, this friar, as indistinct as "The Man," of whom at his death, in contrast with the chaotic weeping and bustling of the relatives "only something remained that flew... into the calm air and then disappeared... to where we will never know.."
The mystery of life and death can also be represented by a continent, and none more fitting than the enigmatic "Asia," which "seems to sleep but is suspended in air.." suits this simile. "Land of wonders" par excellence, with its "mythical bestiary animals," can be explored far and wide by all the Marco Polos of this world, but none will manage to uncover its true hidden treasures. The momentary intuition of the meaning of life is always lurking: "The Horizon of K.D." somehow anticipates the "Song of the Portuguese Girl." Here too, the protagonist feels a sudden and unknown sensation ("Someone far away cried, someone she perhaps did not know...") only to quickly return to normal. "The Hill" is like The Unfound Island: a place no one ever sees because it is eternally covered by a mist that envelops the summit... yet it exists, or at least it MUST exist. Alongside the "red thread" of the mystery of life, another frequent theme in Guccini's lyrics appears here, which will even become obsessive in the last albums: the inexorability of the passage of time, perhaps never so directly and brutally rendered as in "Another Day Has Gone," but also present in "Night Song" (the first of Guccini's three "Night Songs"), where it is made more bearable by a generous dose of irony and an even more generous supply of wine.

A few words also on the musical part: from this album on appears the future core of the Guccini "band": the pianist Vince Tempera, the bassist Ares Tavolazzi, the drummer Ellade Bandini, three excellent musicians. And it shows: even though there is still some naivety (e.g., the exaggerated "moog" that disfigures "The Hill"), the sound compared to the previous album is much more pleasant. But it is clear that this is a classic "to be read" album more than to be listened to, and in this sense, it is one of the best that our songwriters have ever given us.