With Francesco Guccini, one of the great authors of the Italian twentieth century who with his work gave voice to thousands of people disappears. Now it is up to us to pass on its memory
The Guccio. The Master. The pilgrimages to Pavana, the stops in via Paolo Fabbri, a lunch or dinner at Vito’s in the hope of meeting him, the singing at the top of your lungs, the poster who announced the concerts always the same for at least thirty years. His merchandising? That rounded R imitated by thousands of kids with a guitar in their hands. A souvenirs free, popular, perfectly Guccinian, within reach, but not easy. With Francesco Guccini an important piece of Italian song goes and, beyond rhetoric, a voice friendly to the depths, the intimate, the memory and the vision of the world of many Italians. With him also disappears one of the authors who best described the twentieth century, transforming common lives into literature and individual memory into collective heritage. Guccini was a beloved author – he had a real hard core of diehards! – beyond his explicit political positions and gave voice to civil battles, dreams, hopes and betrayed hopes without chasing trends, despite already knowing as a boy that in this way he would perhaps have died as a “black sheep”. Guccini has always told with acuteness and sincerity capable of engaging in an all-encompassing way: listening to Amerigo is equivalent to reading an entire book, and then Bologna, Canzone per un’amica, Via Paolo Fabbri 43, Quattro stracci, L’avelenata, Don Chisciotte, Auschwitz, La locomotiva, and here we are, without wanting to, immersed in a list – of many – which only serves to do an injustice to the excluded songs. Writing about Guccini is difficult: he seemed to have already found all the words, the right ones. It is a sensation shared by at least three generations: those who grew up with him and passed his records to their children, those who received them as an inheritance and accompanied him in concerts and very dense meetings and finally those who, very fortunate recipients of a truly immense cultural heritage, discovered him recently and gathered around him as one does with the wise old man of the village. Of course, these very young people are few and one cannot hope that a generation will pass on the best of its cultural expression through frugal handovers. This is why it is so important that, after this dutiful and ephemeral media overexposure, from September the issue that excludes singer-songwriters from school and literature is remedied, to ensure that De André, Battiato, Guccini do not get lost, waiting for the next ones. To remain with the “Maestrone”, his work possesses all the characteristics of a classic: the language is an ornate word designed to obey metric, sound and accuracy; the contents, then, are dense both when Guccio deals with civil issues and when he touches on political topics, but in the same way when he investigates the human soul, a curve of history, a memory that becomes everyone’s story. On the other hand, as Guccini himself recalled a few years ago, each of his songs is made up of a hundred books. Here, taking him to school – as an author to be studied in a canonical way, not in an extemporaneous way to satisfy an editorial need or the whim of a passionate teacher – bringing him to school would therefore mean recognizing that an important part of twentieth-century Italian literature also chose the form of songwriting, an art form much more in line with literature than with discography commonly understood, especially in recent years, “because due to the fault of others, whatever happens, / sometimes I’m ashamed of doing my job” – Francesco Guccini sang in 1999.
“The heaven of poets is a bit crowded these days/maybe I’ll have a job as an usher or a scribe”; no, dear Francesco, it won’t put you in a corner and no, no “asshole glory” awaits you: here the embrace of thousands of people who have accompanied you for a lifetime and who, from tomorrow, will have the duty to accompany others towards your words awaits you. It is the debt that each generation contracts with the next. And it is one of the highest tasks of the school: it’s up to us.
