Ornella Vanoni
Una Bellissima Ragazza

I admit it. Yes, I admit it: I am absolutely addled. Aged, probably poorly, at the mercy of slightly premature but abundantly foreshadowed senile sentimentalism in the recent past. I indeed enjoyed the sweet melodies of the classic American ballads by Stewart and Garfunkel in recent years... and it couldn't not be a sign...

My office has reduced Bird's flights and Chet's melancholy to give space to the ecstasy of glossy... but that's it... I'm happy like that...

Moreover, I get moved too easily, I don't understand the rock of pimply, eunuch, and badly strumming bands with poorly distorted chords, and even the jolt, yes, that very "jolt," the old jolt inherent in every male's DNA, is no longer what it used to be and, above all, it doesn't leave the same desert-like results...

In short, let's keep the premises brief...: I like Vanoni's latest album. Which is, beyond any reasonable doubt, a record by the old, for the old, and from the old. And, as such, it is made by God.

First of all, because it is probably the only product explicitly designed for the "over fifty"’s (and I'm younger... damn), and not only as a product in itself, but precisely as a composition, both musical and literary. The songs are very well written, speaking of late love with wisdom, humor, self-irony, which explains - after listening to the record - the seemingly very rhetorical title.

She, the Lady, sings always excellently: she has enviable style and technique, which the "bragging rights" of the pausinian/aguillerian school don't even dream of during Christmas. She possesses that thing, today extremely rare and precious, now almost extinct, which can be summarized by the term "style". And style, once the discriminating criterion between those who performed and those who listened, today is a useless variable, almost annoying, as if it were an incomprehensible obstacle to the quarter-hour of fame that we all, forcefully and televisually, feel entitled to.

Vanoni does not bow to the logic of vocalizing and showing off a school she never needed, as natural talent is the best (the only?) school, and being streetwise, experienced, shrewd are the only true "educational" guidelines of her work.

In each of her vocal notes, as in those of the never mourned enough and unreachable Chet, or in those of the very different yet giant Sinatra, there is an entire life, there are thousands of experiences. There is everything that a true artist has the ability and, I would say, the duty to be: one's personal story mediated by society, culture, and talent.

Vanoni, here, crafts an aesthetically perfect product and addresses the audience that can understand her... in short: she does not fall into the typical singer-songwriter mistake of chasing, almost always in a fallacious and pathetic manner, a youthful audience that will never be, but for the tiniest part, hers.

In a word, she does Vanoni. And she is always the best, and the only one, to do it so well.