Sergio Endrigo
Il giardino di Giovanni

Sad to say, I've had the opportunity in a few reviews ago to express my very personal disappointments with record companies, regarding their unwillingness to republish in digital form rare and precious records of Italian songwriting between the seventies and eighties, which are scarce and have now ended up in the bins of oblivion, that I was fortunate enough to recover in their original vinyl format. Records of true refinement, verses written with taste, sung with elegance and never musically predictable. The cat Paoli… the shelved Lauzi… or the forgotten Endrigo, an artist who never explicitly exposed himself in any of his albums to political references or beliefs. He sang from the beginning of his career about the impressions of the time, always with great sensitivity and melodic creativity, so much so that in 1994 he was "robbed” of an unknown composition he wrote in 1974 with his brother-in-law Riccardo Del Turco, by a well-known composer of international stature, who used it to take home a glorious statuette for Best Soundtrack 1996, recognized as Endrigo’s only in the fall of 2013, after a lawsuit that dragged on for almost twenty years, during which the Friulian singer-songwriter also unfortunately had time to end up underground, without knowing the verdict. Despite this, there was no need to demonstrate the stature of this artist with an Oscar more than posthumous by now; Endrigo’s enormity, for those who frequent the finest and most elegant singer-songwriter circles, has already been recognized for decades.

An artist who, even in the opportunistic Italy of the “Milano Da Bere" era, with Yuppies, “paninari” and slicked-back hair, had the courage and desire to reappear from time to time, quietly and discreetly, to publish his thoughts, his perceptions, his dreams, so pure and natural that one wonders why he was never able to position himself prominently with a wider audience.

For accuracy and to be fair to everyone, I take back, but only partially, what I wrote in the introduction, because in reality there is also a compact disc version of the aforementioned album, but it is so archaic and out of catalog that it is now unavailable.

At the end of 1988, "Il Giardino Di Giovanni" is the antithesis of what the eighties proposed. It is a product in which Sergio relates heavily to his past, proposing as many as sixteen tracks, eight unreleased in the first LP, “Il giardino di Giovanni“, “La tigre“ (a piece mainly linked to the cover of the album), “Fiori“, “Correre“, "Questo è amore", “Ancora un giro“, “L’Italia che non conta“, “Stazioni“ and another eight "remakes" in the second, all without being lengthily prolix, as the two records have a total duration of 57 minutes; the older pieces, wisely rearranged, flow fast and pleasant and are drawn in a varied way from his more remote and celebrated discography between 1962 and 1970: “Io che amo solo te“, “Teresa“, “Adesso sì“, “L’arca di Noè“, “Canzone per te”, “Via Broletto“, “La prima compagnia” and “Era d’estate”. The new and mature Endrigo of the late eighties blends perfectly with that of two decades earlier; there is a union between them, pervading with that same poetic, romantic, reflective, and intimate vein, expressed with simplicity and elegance since the sixties, and that modern sound is evident, which unites them, thanks to the contribution of musicians such as Guido Benigni, (mainly a guitarist and at the same time a skilled multi-instrumentalist, a devotee of refined sounds, active for decades on stages throughout Europe with the "Acustica Medievale", who later worked with artists of the caliber of Paolo Fresu and Max Manfredi, with whom he would win a Tenco in a couple of years, and collaborator of Michael Jackson in the "Bad World Tour"), the arranger Euro Ferrari and the artistic production of Edoardo De Angelis.

There is that love, that laconic hope, and that universal sensitivity that bind the whole album, tied to that wise awareness of the passage of time and that tedious and slight melancholy that has always accompanied it. The artwork on the cover is remarkable: one of the many lurking tigers painted by Antonio Ligabue, a mad and visionary artist, probably a synonym for free and wild spirit, longing to biologically prevail as a predator, but helplessly crushed by inconvenient rules and conventions.

"Il giardino di Giovanni" will be his penultimate album of unreleased tracks before definitively closing in 1993 with the now untouchable "Qualcosa di meglio," and to those who asked him why he decided to close his discography activity, he replied: “Since 1980 I have recorded five records that were literally thrown away by the discography, not promoted, not distributed and therefore ignored by the general public”.