Paola Turci
Saluto L'Inverno

When Paola Turci presented Saluto l'inverno at the Festival della Canzone Italiana, the "jury" did not give her a good position in the final ranking. They classified her in a miserable and mediocre fifth place. Before her were artists who would later achieve that great success that Turci would never reach. That year, Elisa won with Luce (Tramonti a Nord-Est), and Giorgia came second with the song Di sole e d'azzurro. In third and fourth place were two mediocre and absolutely forgettable songs, namely Questa nostra grande storia d'amore and L'acrobata, by Matia Bazar and Michele Zarrillo, respectively. The jury evidently did not adequately assess Turci's song: did they read the lyrics well? Did they examine each word carefully and subsequently the overall concept the song wanted to convey? No.

Definitely, Carmen Consoli did a good job. She wrote lyrics that felt like poetry, truly Italian music: the singer-songwriter style, in the wake of the greatest Italian songwriters such as Battisti and De Andrè, envied by the vast majority of contemporary singers, who write songs no longer for the two main reasons a songwriter writes, which are passion and profit, but only for profit. Currently, in Italy, there is one valid songwriter every 1000. Valeria Rossi was and is a songwriter, but her songs and albums are not even remotely comparable to the works of genius that sprung from the minds of the two great fathers of Italian singer-songwriter music.

Returning to talk about Turci's song, it can be said that it is very well made, with good music and an excellent text. Consoli managed to blend adjectives and nouns admirably: fervent-impulse, perennial-journey, unusual-intoxication. Nothing to do with the intricate lyrics of a De Andrè or a Mogol, but still respectable.

In my opinion, that 2001 Sanremo was a Festival with many objectively good songs: unfortunately, the jury did not adequately assess them, being composed at the time as today of people who had little or nothing to do with music. This song is a classic example that confirms that good Italian music is not yet dead, but lives on (albeit increasingly sporadically) in some songs born from a few survivors left from the shipwreck of Italian singer-songwriter music.