Franco Fanigliulo
Io e me

It was love at first sight between me and Franco Fanigliulo when his presence shook the cards of the San Remo Festival in 1979 with that poetic, surreal song, almost a fairy tale both innocent and bitter at the same time (complete with a grammatical error in the title to emphasize the childish nature of the piece), titled "A me mi piace vivere alla grande".

It was also quite a significant turning point for the festival, which marked the debut of an atypical, whimsical, and irreverent singer-songwriter very much indebted to Rino Gaetano, who sang with that song a mix of irreverent sharpness and adolescent poetry, fused together and bound by phrases and verses that have entered our collective imagination. The verses "foglie di cocaina, voglio sentirmi male, uguale a un gatto rosa per essere sporcato e raccontare a tutti che sono innamorato" were brutally censored by the RAI committee and the "foglie di cocaina" became "bagni di candeggina, voglio sentirmi uguale" thus completely changing the sense. The historic verse was then "adesso che Gesù ha un clan di menestrelli che parte dai blue jeans e arriva a Zeffirelli" which mocked the abuse of the deity to advertise the jeans "Jesus" (the historic campaign "Chi mi ama mi segua") or to launch the film of our polemical director. In short, the song burst into my imagination and changed its standards, making me glimpse things and potential in the - medium/song - that at the time (15 years old) I hadn't grasped. The real discovery then was the rest of the songs on the album where Fanigliulo hinted at a wider world and expressed a poetry, a poignant expressiveness, with that his defiant and sarcastic way of singing, of equal dignity if not superior to his more famous colleagues (he had a solid friendship with the budding Zucchero and the first Vasco Rossi).

Listen to the heart-wrenching "Marco e Giuditta" that makes me cry every time I listen to it, or "L'artista" with its mission statement about why a life choice. A heartfelt and painful album, despite its linguistic puns and its dreamy and visionary vein, which unfortunately in 1989, due to a brain hemorrhage, at only 45 years old, bade us farewell to a versatile and profound artist who would have surely given us incredible songs if fate (or misfortune, which often coincide) had not struck him heavily. A great artistic and human loss.