Franco Califano
Ti perdo

Califano is someone who, "womanizer, drug addict, wandering soul," if the best-crafted things are those where you perceive the close adherence between the character and what he professes, then, just for this, he should be rewarded.

It would be easy to wash one's hands of it and join the crowd of those who, from a corner of comfortable ignorance, raise the finger and solve the diagnosis of the personality only by branding it with vile wickedness.

But Califano is a complex character; certainly troubled. He is one of those who, if you try to reconstruct his psychological profile, you risk becoming mad yourself, because certain behaviors, one diametrically opposed to the other, transcend any logical linearity. Faced with this scheme, it's natural for some to raise the white flag, with a double possibility: either completely ignoring "the clinical case," or joining the herd who, not understanding, resolve by throwing curses.

Finally, there are those who, reluctantly, cannot resist the challenge of understanding and problematize as much as possible, trying to redeem what their emotional eloquence allows them to redeem.

Let me say that Califano was a poet. Yes, he was. Because all poets suffer from their hypersensitivity; within them, there are explosions of hatred and then of tears, of Love and then of hunger and thirst...

Poets are afraid of silence and need to sing to counter their chronic feelings of emptiness.

There is a song by Califano that I believe best expresses his poetics: "Sacred Love, Profane Love":

"Sacred love, profane love in me unite
But it is not enough to make me pray
even I am hanging on a cross only the altar is missing"

There are poets among the vagabonds, the wandering, womanizers and drug addicts, who try to stabilize their instability by whipping themselves. As if tangible pain could give shape and thus better comprehensibility to inner pain.

"What men call Love is very little thing, limited and unstable, if compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that gives itself entirely, poetry and charity, to the sudden arrival, to the stranger who passes by"

And, if Baudelaire says so...

Ultimately, I would like to say that "Er Califfo" was a "poète flâneur". A child (and do not think that with this I mean "childish". Rather, I want to indicate a Nietzschean soul), fully immersed in his own acute senses, who discovers and rediscovers life: after a day spent gathering impressions, having become a composer and lyricist, from the height of his...bed, he aesthetically transfigures what he has experienced.

All the women Califano loved must have been for him like "La Bellezza" by Baudelaire; that beauty which is life itself, condensed into a thousand women's bodies and into poetry:

"I am beautiful, o mortals! like a dream of stone, and my breast, upon which, one after another, all have laid down, is made to inspire the poet with an eternal and mute love, like matter itself"

And what did you tell us about "Ti perdo"?

Nothing, if you accuse me of not having touched any specific song; everything, if you understand that music must be listened to and that, to understand it, just like any other work that has textual support, it is enough to understand the poetics of its author.

Anyway, here's something for you:

Listen to "Non me portà a casa" and you will perceive (do you know how wise and genius intuition is?) what Franco, deep down, perceived about himself...