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Rating: For personal reasons that won't interest the reader, I sometimes find myself strolling through the streets of central Verona, discovering its beauty with every detour along Piazza Bra, Via Mazzini, Piazza Erbe, Piazza Dante, and Ponte Pietra. Compared to other beautiful nearby cities (Vicenza, for example, is not any less, Padua perhaps a bit more dull, forgive me Bisius...) Verona has the characteristic of being pleasant even on foggy days in mid-November, where the rain wets the aquiline profile of Alighieri and swells the calm course of the Adige.
During my walks in the Scaligero center, I am accompanied, like a movement of the soul, by the music of the great Gatti di Vicolo Miracoli, a cabaret and musical ensemble that grew up in the local Maffei classical high school, composed of a handful of young people who would make their way into the world of entertainment, not without pop trash derivations of which, still today, the repercussions can be seen—I'm referring to Umberto Smaila (voice, keyboards), Franco Oppini (bass), Nini Salerno (guitar), and Jerry Calà (voice, drums).
Two pieces, in particular, that I feel compelled to review, under the artificial term "single," given that these were never released on the same vinyl and are now hard to find, unless rearranged in some solo albums by Smaila and Calà.
The first track "Capito?!" (1979) was the theme of an edition of Domenica In from the late '70s, of which I still remember a video with a splendid Calà dressed as an infant. It's a dynamic pop/cabaret piece with choral rhythms, in which our characters list all their desires and dreams... like having a submersible sofa, warming Ornella Muti under a plaid, topping the Hit Parade, taking a bath in the tub where Raquel Welch luxuriates, and so on.... Until the explosion of the liberating and absurd Capitooooooo?!? by Calà. The choral counterpoints in the final part of the song are splendid, where the four Gatti (it's appropriate to say) seem to encourage their audience to follow them in their vein of madness. The mood and tension are those of the best Cochi e Renato, sharing with the great Lombard duo those surreal tones and that irony essentially for its own sake that so characterized the northern comedy of the time (in contrast to the all-Neapolitan elegance and finesse of Troisi’s Smorfia, the sociological effectiveness and Roman disillusionment of a Verdone, the boldness and iconoclasm of the early Benigni).
A genuine masterpiece of lyrics and music is instead "Verona Beat," the soundtrack of the partly autobiographical film "Arrivano i Gatti" (1980), later the theme for a show hosted by Smaila in the latter half of the '80s with a friendly and charming Fabrizia Carminati. Here, there's no joking: the Gatti weave an elegy of Verona [or rather, the province] that once was, in a transcendent dimension that nostalgically recalls the '60s, or the eternal adolescence that we all experience: amidst references to Equipe '84, and singer-songwriters hungry for freedom, futile escapes to see one's beloved, blue tracksuits, hunger strikes for Bangladesh destined to end due to a lack of demonstrators, races with dad's car.... The song leaves a bitter taste of passing time, of youth destined not to return.... and suddenly you realize that behind the clown mask the four have a heart and spirit to spare, as well as a certain culture, musical and otherwise.
Smaila and his companions wonderfully describe the mediocrity of most and, in those late '70s, they were already carrying that reflux that, at least in Italy, would erase collective dreams and desires in favor of an individualism à la Milano da bere... from which the last twenty-five years of national history would descend. Prophetic.
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