Francesco Guccini
Non So Che Viso Avesse

THE REVIEW

Between a Donatello and a Masaccio, busy memorizing the nuances in a quaint Italian of Vasari, I ponder: Why do we read [auto]biographies? Excluding school cases, of course. Perhaps we see in the artist - whether engaged in music, film, literature, art, etc. - a kind of Übermensch from whom to draw, a kind of embodied paradigm that we admire for its unreachable quality; the [auto]biography, in this case, would serve to make [them] more approachable and - why not? - to reveal some mystery of this particular innate talent of theirs.

And that 3/4 of [auto]biographies are boastful/self-satisfied and cloying is a crime in which Guccio has not incurred, because he loves to talk about other things to talk about himself, and with this device, he orchestrates a pleasant book, a bizarre biography where the first chapter is centered on the culinary habits of the Pavanese mountaineers from almost a hundred years ago and some of the following ones on his ancestors. And then the cigarettes he reduced from his life, the wine from the taverns (yes, even the one from Fuori Porta), love and love for politics... And the music of course, but as a projection of a human existence and not as a childish +/- chronological list of albums and songs (which, by the way, is not missing, but written by another pair of hands, whose brain examines LP by LP and even the last two singles, as well as the narrative career of the crude Modenese singer-songwriter). The beginning of his most famous ballad headlines an unconventional autobiography, interesting if for no other reason than the setup given to it.