Pupo, Emanuele Filiberto, Luca Canonici
Italia amore mio

Hello everyone and welcome back to these pages, friends!

Sorry if the review will be so-so and not like my old standards from two years ago, but it was thrown together haphazardly before dinner, considering that I've lost a bit of touch in reviewing.

However, I would like to dedicate some of my lines, with and for you, to the Sanremo Festival and the song that, among them all, struck me the most, "Italia amore mio" by Pupo, his Highness Prince Emanuele Filiberto, and the tenor Luca Canonici, in my opinion - and not just mine, quite honestly, if you want, I'll provide the text messages received on my phone from the Alps to the Pyramids! - one of the best songs of the decade, and probably, the only true anthem that has been played at the Ariston in the last decades, at least since the equally valid "Italia" by the late Mino Reitano.

I know already that, except for the more astute, some of you will have already raised an eyebrow and/or clicked with the mouse muttering "The usual Il_Paolo, who passes off nonsense as chocolate and ruins the site for us!", but I think it's not so, and, within the expressive limits and time I've set for myself, I will also try to tell you why.

This is a song that talks about love, but not the hackneyed love in the classic Sanremo style, that is, for Him or Her, about which we had great essays in the past, but about multiple loves, nuanced and at the same time universal: Pupo's love for the audience, witnessed by the catchy and radio-friendly harmonies of the choruses and piano orchestrations; Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia's love for his (and our) Belpaese and the values it embodies or should embody, seen by a young man like him, born in an exile that seemed doomed to be perpetual, and which led him to see, from afar and by virtue of the farsightedness of all those who are distant, more the merits than the limits of beautiful Italy; not least, the excellent tenor Luca Canonici's love for bel canto and opera, that is, for art in its entirety, giving us a performance, surely facilitated by an air molded on the well-known "Over the Rainbow", that undoubtedly leads everyone to stand up and join the singing, voices permitting, in this joyful explosion culminating in the refrain "Italia amore mio".

Well, in that magical little word, "Italia" precisely, we have a climax that brings together, in a single entity, all possible loves, seen in a transfigured, superior key, mediated by the popular art of the three, that is, audience, people, and music, in a word Us, all of us, including the kind audience of Debaser.

"Italia amore mio" is, in short, a song born to be universal, transversal, made to unite rather than divide (and it's deeply ironic that the audience and critics have been divided in judging it), revealing intentions from a little ancient world that, reviewed today and in these tormenting moments, sounds a bit like a fairy tale in which, all things considered, it's not bad to believe.

Almost a way of going back to a time when, with the innocent eyes and ears with which all of us, even here inside, approached music, we believed that all music was in Sanremo, and everything, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, was enclosed in that little magical television screen that we turned on with or without our parents' permission. Which is like when we went to elementary school, and thought the whole world was contained in our neighborhood.

A simple world, almost childish, in which everything seemed easy, even pain, not to mention the beautiful things that always and anyway, even today, have the magic of ease.

That the whole thing then seems fake, almost kitsch I would say, inserted in a certainly disappointing context in recent years, like that of Sanremo (but I would praise the buxom Antonellina Clerici), destined to raise controversy as the royal offspring descendant of a lineage that has certainly not behaved well towards the Italians - and especially the minority of the Italians - is indeed true, and intellectual honesty obliges us to recognize it, no matter how much the sympathy for the three and for the show they may have put on might obscure our view.

Yet, you know how I think, these objections do not take away the value of the merits of a piece already entered in history, already classic - or instant classic as someone told me – since they are directed at the people who produced the piece, and not at the piece itself and the emotions it can and will be able to give over the years by virtue of its objective virtues, and the persuasive ability revealed to the audience.

A piece, a song, a phrase, speak for themselves, and they do so with more force as the moment in which they were written, played, uttered moves further away, the more, over time, the profiles of the author fade, and the echo of the word and the notes strengthens.

That's why, despite the obvious criticisms - which I can, at most, even share by putting myself in the shoes of the alternative/average young Italian - I think this song, at the same time nothing more and much more than a song, will survive the years to become a symbol and epitome of a historical period, of the spirit of a people, as for example happened to "L'italiano" by Toto Cutugno.

And with that, I close - to return to anonymity - with a little colorful note: some time ago, sunbathing on a sunny beach to the notes of a classic by Gino Paoli, thinking of the days that passed slowly, leaving the taste of salt in my mouth, I was told about a man from the village who, having gone to the States, would return every year telling his relatives of his career as a showman in Broccolino and New Yock, supporting good jazzmen from the sordid neighborhoods of the suburbs: one year, he came back with his guitar and his song dedicated to his mother, in which he stated that of mother, and of homeland, "there is only one". When then, years later and old, he died, for all the things he had done in life, it was that song that spoke for him and survived him.

So I wouldn’t be too hard on Emanuele Filiberto: years and years from now, this song will survive him, and I don't think it's bad for a guy with his history, and for a country with our History, to remember this cheeky fellow for a piece that, like all songs, in the end speaks to us, in one way or another, about love. Indeed, Love.

Historically Yours

Il_Paolo