Sergio Endrigo
Quando la musica è poesia

Born in Pola in 1933, Sergio Endrigo began to play in the difficult 1950s in some of the most famous and renowned nightclubs in Northern Italy. He approached the world of singer-songwriters only around 1958 and recorded his first single in 1960. In 1962, he released his first and most important solo album: the record includes a track, "Io che amo solo te", which over the years will become a huge national-popular success destined, without excess and formality, to shine with pure light.
Rightly so, this is followed by great triumphs like "Via Broletto 34", "Viva Maddalena", "Aria di neve". Over time, Endrigo develops an intimate and melancholic vein typical of the sad and heartbreaking French chansoniers. He thus records tracks of high artistic and qualitative value: "Mani bucate", "Teresa" (re-proposed years later by his friend and accomplice Gino Paoli), "Adesso sì" (snatched by Battisti a few years before being interpreted by Endrigo).
The peak of success and popularity is dated 1968: he wins the 17th edition of the Sanremo Festival and brings to the limelight a beautiful and touching song, "Canzone per te" (the famous opening line: "The party has just started, it's already over..."). "Canzone per te", to be honest, is not entirely Endrigo's grain: Sergio Bardotti and Luis Bacalov collaborate on the text and music (authors, among other things, of some minor songs by Endrigo: "Il dolce paese", "Una storia", "Quando ti lascio", "Perché non dormi fratello", "Come stasera mai"). In 1969 he returns to Sanremo with "Lontano dagli occhi", finishing second. In 1970, he places third with the very famous "L'arca di Noè", sung in duet with Iva Zanicchi. Encapsulated in a handful of exceptional songs, this is the first part of Sergio Endrigo's career. Songs apparently simple yet, beneath the surface, profoundly nonconformist.

The second part of his career is, in reality, less famous and less cheerful. In the early 1970s, Endrigo forms friendships with some of the most famous poets of the time, from Giuseppe Ungaretti to Mario Luzi, from Ignazio Buttitta to Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1973 he meets Gianni Rodari and immediately begins collaborating with the great children's poet on writing some amusing children's songs: the most famous being "La casa", later re-proposed in many different versions ("It was a very nice house, without a roof, without a kitchen, [...] But it was beautiful, truly beautiful, on Via dei Matti at number Zero").
In the meantime, he intensifies his cultural musical interests and decides, somewhat unexpectedly, to turn toward typically Brazilian sounds and rhythms. He makes friends with Vinicius De Moraes, Rafael Alberti, Chico Buarque De Hollanda, and Toquinho, and publishes, almost clandestinely, a series of Caribbean and Brazilian albums (there's no need for you to try searching for them, they've been out of circulation for at least twenty years). Between 1985 and 1995, he unfairly falls into a kind of musical oblivion which, whether willing or not, leads him to reflect on his past and his mistakes: it is a sad period, no record company wants to produce an album for him, and the radios, those free ones so stupidly acclaimed, refuse him because, illogically, his music is not on target. The modern music scene unfortunately cannot appreciate the simple and unconventional style of a perfect artist and, despite the passing years, constantly very clear-minded.

Between a television appearance and an appearance at some unknown country festival, in 2001 Endrigo was awarded the prestigious Luigi Tenco Prize. Unfortunately, however, illness begins to gnaw at his soul: he speaks little, thinks a lot, and, almost in a kind of mocking irony, his lower limbs become semi-paralyzed. He dies, alone and sad, in 2005, after suing his friend Luis Bacalov for plagiarizing the notes of one of his famous songs to compose the soundtrack for "Il postino" (a soundtrack that earned Bacalov, among other things, the prestigious Oscar statuette).