Ravioli da intorto alla cantautora with Francesco Guccini

It’s when Francesco Guccini tells me about the young lady on the fifth floor that I realise what I’m doing there. When we’re in the car (which Guccini doesn’t drive, having never got his licence), and he recites the lyrics of a song that isn’t on this album of other people’s songs from the last century, but which he would have liked to include, and I’m fiddling about on my mobile (which Guccini doesn’t have, because he doesn’t have the urge to keep up to date like the rest of us, who are always afraid of missing out on something), and I discover that Achille Togliani recorded that very song when Francesco Guccini was nine years old, and you can bet I understand that obsession all too well, given that I know the Sanremo Festival from when I was nine in greater detail than my own medical records. It’s halfway between Francesco and Raffaella’s house in Pàvana and the restaurant where they always have lunch, whilst he explains to me that the building on the right is the customs house from the days when the Vatican State lay to the right and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to the left (at least I think so: I’m the first of my kind not to have studied), and it dawns on me: childhood may not be destiny, but after a certain age, one’s formative years become an obsession, and if there’s anyone who shaped me, it’s that gentleman there, sitting in the passenger seat explaining that he could no longer live in Bologna because the traffic upsets him. That gentleman I met in the Apennines on a train, during which I spent the whole time thinking ‘relentless rails leading nowhere’, dressed ‘in blue, because I hate black’, on a day of torrential rain that, as soon as I stepped off the train, forced me to mutter ‘if only you could see me in my Bogart- or Keaton-style trench coat, coming to find you in the rain’.

Let’s rewind. Two hours earlier, at the kitchen table in the house in Pàvana. Soncini: I’m finding it a bit tricky to talk to you, because I usually express myself almost exclusively through quotes from Guccini. Guccini: Ah, but go on then. Pàvana’s house is the one that his grandparents used to rent out to tourists; at the time, Francesco Guccini lived a little further along, at the mill where he recorded his penultimate album in 2012. It was a different house, a different century, a different idea of comfort. “This isn’t a particularly luxurious house, but I look around and there’s a fridge. Seventy years ago, we were passing through Bologna, and my mother said to me: ‘Look, a fridge.’ ‘But we’ve got one too.’ ‘No, we’ve got an icebox – it doesn’t make ice, you have to put it in yourself.’ And we’d never put any in because it was expensive; we weren’t rich enough for ice. There’s a sink over there: the tap on the left gives hot water. That’s a fantastic luxury. There’s a television over there: the Guccini family got their first telly in 1960, along with the Fiat fridge, which is now in the cellar but still works.” I tell him that my usual response to young people who claim no generation has ever had it as bad as theirs is: ‘Your great-grandmother used to wash clothes in the river.’ He tells me that his mother used to wash them in the ‘bottaccio’; he has to explain to me that it’s the mill’s reservoir where ‘in the evening they’d wash my feet, even though I’d protest: “You’ve already washed them yesterday.” And they did the washing there, and it was feminine: ‘bughèda’ in the Modenese dialect, ‘bugada’ in the Pavanese. ‘Laundry’ is always feminine in the dialects.” With Guccini, you always end up talking about words; it’s the same with me: only carry on reading if you’re a real fan of this sort of thing.

We are familiar with your songs, of course, but also Dalla’s “Com’è profondo il mare” or Baglioni’s “La vita è adesso” – these are records with a lexical richness that not even university lecturers possess today. How is it that those who work with words have ended up with a vocabulary as meagre as that of an engineer or a milkman? “Raffaella teaches. The poverty of vocabulary among these secondary school pupils is alarming. And there’s only one reason: they don’t read. In 1952, I used to read Il Vittorioso, a Catholic weekly. It ran a competition: ‘Describe your village’. I wrote a short story, which was published, much to my satisfaction, even though the prize they sent me didn’t live up to my expectations. It began with the words ‘in the winding, wooded gorge’: I challenge any twelve-year-old today to know what ‘gorge’ and ‘winding’ mean. Perhaps ‘wooded’, yes.” A twelve-year-old, but I suspect a thirty-year-old too. As well as vocabulary and dialects, in the eighty-second year of his life, Francesco Guccini – the eternal student – devoted himself to folk songs and historical research. He tells me about Costantino Nigra, “young, romantic, handsome, cultured: he was sent by Cavour to Paris to charm Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, who was himself charmed by the beautiful Countess of Castiglione, aged twenty, who apparently succeeded in her endeavour, and indeed Napoleon III supported Italy. But Empress Eugénie was very devout: there was a mutual attraction between the two, but I don’t think they ever ‘got down to business’.” We agree that neither twelve-year-olds nor thirty-year-olds will understand what ‘got down to business’ means.

“The Americans arrived here in October ’44, I remember them very well. They’d come round to our house to eat my grandparents’ fried polenta and the pasta dish they loved so much. I’d go to the Americans’ canteen, for me it was a feast of delicacies I’d never seen before – tinned pineapple, peanut butter. They’d listen to Bing Crosby’s song, ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’; I’d mangle the chorus, ‘lacapistoldà’; they’d make me sing it and reward me with chocolate, which I’d eat in secret because my mum wouldn’t let me.” I recall the ‘priest’ – that wrought-iron contraption filled with embers which, at my grandmother’s house where there was no heating, was placed inside the bed before we got in – but Guccini has a far more beautiful image in his repertoire. “At my grandparents’ house, as well as the ‘priest’, they’d put a cannon cartridge in the bed. Near the house there were tanks that fired at set times as if they were going to the office, and they’d give them the cartridge cases: brass was incredibly valuable. One of these cartridge cases, sealed with a screw cap, was filled with hot water from the wood-burning stove, and you’d put it in bed to warm your feet at night.”

At the restaurant, the singer-songwriter orders half a portion of ravioli from the singer-songwriter – a recipe of his own that Mimmo – who, having fed him, is deservedly amongst those thanked in the booklet for "Canzoni da intorto" – has added to the menu: ravioli with butter and Parmesan, topped with strips of prosciutto. There’s one thing the gentleman whose songs I grew up with has been saying for years in every interview, proving time and again that no one is less capable of assessing a work than its creator: Francesco Guccini says that "L’avvelenata" is a minor song. I take offence on behalf of all those who have listened to Guccini – they haven’t just read the critics’ opinions – and therefore know that Guccini’s songbook isn’t primarily militant, but rather shines in love songs and invectives (‘nonsense, nonsense,’ he mutters, denying his own talent for invective). I am offended as a woman, as a listener, as a Bolognese, as a former teenager and as an old woman. Over dinner, I call him to account. He, being cruel, tells me with horror about a friend who lives nearby and ‘every time I go to visit him, he subjects me to the infamous ritual of making me listen to “L’avvelenata”’. I protest that it’s like Fossati hating “La mia banda suona il rock”. “He’s right, because he’s written better songs.” But the audience wants to hear that one: ask yourselves why. “As for the audience, I do ask myself that.” I’m this close to saying ‘shame on you’, to saying ‘how dare you’. I settle for: ‘Well then, tell me what Guccini’s ten best songs are; come on, let’s hear them.’ What follows are several minutes in which he names a track and I try not to say ‘are you daft?’, I suggest another and he tries not to say ‘are you daft?’, but it’s clear we’re both thinking it. Of all the ones I suggest, he only accepts "Lettera" and "Signora Bovary" (when that album came out, I was in my second year of sixth form; by my fifth year, Flaubert had inevitably become, for me, the bloke Guccini had copied). Raffaella suggests a few as well – I won’t say which ones – but bear in mind that the author dismisses them with “Oh, come on, then” and “I wrote it myself, I know best”. Ten minutes later, Raffaella has a change of heart: “But nobody mentioned Autogrill.” How could we have done that? What a disgrace. It’s too late now; the discussion is over. The last word went to Mimmo: “Just imagine, Francesco, one day doing all this just to find Achille Lauro’s ten most important tracks.” If this had been a brilliant 20th-century English play, the curtain would have fallen right there.

I’m in my final year of high school, the year Gustave plagiarised Francesco. I’m backstage at a Guccini concert in Bologna. A short while ago, Fabrizio De André was in the VIP box; once the concert was over, he came over to say hello and said to him: “How do you manage it? I have to stay seated – I’ve got a backache.” It’s the winter of 1991, so De André has just turned fifty-one, meaning he, Guccini and my father are all the same age – they’re the same age I’ll be in 2023. I was eighteen at the time, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about: I couldn’t even imagine the possibility that Guccini might not be pacing back and forth at the edge of the stage, talking to the audience like a consummate stand-up comedian, changing the lyrics of his songs to include references to current events – in short, not being Guccini. It’s a possibility that perhaps even he hasn’t considered yet, as he hasn’t actually written ‘and there’s a suspicion that the breathlessness and gasping after a run are trivial’. But he has already written ‘where has today gone, yesterday will pass’, and ‘staying in bed the day after is perhaps my only goal’: he already knows it all; I am a mere eighteen years old: I know nothing, and I’ve never had backache. Almost thirty-two years later, I do not mention this to Guccini. It is a conversation full of unspoken memories, unasked questions, unspoken madeleines. (In Year 5 we also studied Proust, who, as far as I was concerned, was the individual who had copied the snacks from Palombella Rossa. It is truly inexplicable that my French teacher would not allow me to take my A-levels.)

Raffaella is marking homework over there, whilst Francesco and I are chatting in the kitchen and three cats are coming and going. Pointing to the ginger one, he says, ‘This is Raffaella’s cat, the bloody cat’ (the bloody cat sleeps with them, and the night before Francesco was coughing; the bloody cat got scared and scratched Raffaella’s face). I’m trying to keep my quotes from the interviewee to a minimum, so I don’t tell him that "Il pensionato" comes to mind – the one who “tells me a hundred times, amidst the garden fences, about one of his dead cats, about a row with the neighbours”. But I do tell him that, between the phase when it seemed to me that the song that best captured my old age was "Canzone delle osterie di fuori porta", and the current one (in which "Lettera" seems to resemble me more), there was a moment when I saw myself reflected in "Il Pensionato". He tells me it was all true, that it’s a phrase he’ll repeat several times: here we are, struggling to convince the public that I’m someone else, whilst Guccini calmly admits that he never made anything up. The pensioner was his neighbour; he was the one who, by insisting that an anarchist had hijacked the train, gave him the idea to write "La locomotiva". He made a delicious wine, and the idea for the song about him came to him the day he went into his house and saw an envelope resting on the sideboard with the words, underlined in blue and red: ‘in the event of my death’. “He was a cobbler who specialised in deformed feet. He made me some shoes: as ugly as sin, but I’ve never had shoes so comfortable.” It’s not really that surprising that every one of Guccini’s song lyrics is a perfect screenplay: so are the stories in his conversations.

“Tell me how you go about seducing people with “I Morti di Reggio Emilia”.” Francesco Guccini says he’s never given his albums titles, except for “Radici” and “Signora Bovary” (unasked question: you’re surely not telling me that "D’amore di morte e di altre sciocchezze" wasn’t your idea); and that it was Raffaella who said those were her ‘seduction’ songs, which she used to ‘pick up’ men (which is a uglier word than ‘seduce’, but necessary to make the concept clear to anyone so disadvantaged as to be unfamiliar with the Emilian lexicon). “An affectionate, mischievous, but untrue inference”. The record label jumped at the chance, perhaps thinking that, if the revered maestro is so keen on making an album with folk songs from a century ago, at least it would need a catchy title. It’s a joy that the title is so absurd and so beautiful, but it wasn’t necessary: this is Guccini; he hadn’t released an album for ten years; at Mimmo’s, there’s a steady stream of people telling him the album’s no longer available in shops – it’s only been out for three days and they’ve already sold out. "Canzoni da intorto" is not on Spotify; if you want to listen to it, you have to buy it – just like in the 20th century – and perhaps read the marvellous notes in the booklet that accompanies the songs. The singer (who isn’t the songwriter this time) has boasted in every interview that he doesn’t even know what streaming is. When a woman approaches his table at the restaurant and says, ‘I always listen to it whilst doing Pilates’, I feel like asking the man without a driving licence or streaming whether he knows what Pilates is, but – of the hundred questions I do not ask – this one would be superfluous; the answer was already there, in the last century, in Quattro stracci: ‘The freedom of your potions, of yoga, of herbs, of the psyche, of homeopathy’.

Is it the times that shape people, or people who shape the times? I sound a bit like Marzullo, I know. “Yes, I was just about to say that. Perhaps the times – the times are fundamental. My generation was used to contributing as soon as we got a job: out of twenty thousand lire, I’d give ten to the household.” On the day of his First Communion, little Francesco – who hadn’t been able to attend the feast because he’d only just recovered from jaundice – was taken to the cinema. But not, as he’d wanted, to see "Buffalo Bill": "The Dragon’s Lineage", a film about Mao’s Long March. (Hours later, back home, I’d look it up and discover that Katharine Hepburn was playing a Chinese woman: just think of that today).

He repeated Year 5 twice. Not because he’d failed the year, but because his father didn’t think he was ready to move up to secondary school. (His father was a postal worker; he’d trained as a technical and industrial engineer and broken with his grandparents’ tradition, ‘the first not to be a miller since the 16th century’. Francesco’s great-grandfather didn’t agree – who on earth would run the mill, after all? – so his grandmother had said: ‘I’ll pay for him to study myself.’ Objection: but that meant ‘I’m the first in my family to have studied’ wasn’t true. Guccini raises an eyebrow: ‘My father was very good with his hands, something I’m not, but he hadn’t attended a humanities school.’)

These days, if a teacher fails a young lad, the parents kick up a fuss. “I saw an interview on the telly; a mother was saying, ‘My son’s a genius’ – he was a ‘trapper’, I think that’s what they call it – I heard the bit where she said: ‘I’d have given him a good thrashing. How can you say he’s a genius? You’re a bit daft yourself’.” You’ll never get those days back – and not just the days when parents were quick to give their kids a good thrashing. I cannot render the story of the mother who dismisses the adult Francesco into dialect the way he tells it, so you will have to make do with the Italian version. Francesco still lives with his parents, and he is already giving concerts. ‘But is that really a job?’ asks his mother. ‘Does anyone actually come to see you?’ ‘There were fifteen thousand of them last night,’ replies her son. ‘They’ve absolutely nothing better to do,’ she concludes disconsolately, though she’ll never go to one of her son’s concerts. Just think about today. Since all that talk about the pampering parents need to provide to raise children who are confident in themselves and their talent is, in fact, just talk, Guccini has grown into an adult with a certain awareness of his own talents. When I tell him about my obsession with "Lettera", he doesn’t play it down or feign modesty, but does something familiar to the rest of us with overinflated self-esteem: he talks to me about the difficulty of living up to his own expectations. “I wrote the first verse of Lettera, which is a tapestry of internal rhymes, assonances and alliterations; then, just as I was about to write the second, I said to myself: ‘What do I do now? How do I carry on?’ Then I more or less managed it.” He points out to me that, if I’m fixated on the theme of lost time, there’s also “Autunno”, with its “many ‘I shall be’s that have become, forever, ‘I was’s’.”

(Question not asked. In the 1990s, Guccini wrote, in addition to "Lettera", "Quello che non è Parole", "Cyrano" and "Nostra signora dell’ipocrisia", "Canzone delle domande consuete", "Addio, Non bisognerebbe" and "Quattro stracci". Between the ages of fifty and sixty, Francesco Guccini, a mere jester, churned out a series of masterpieces enough to make anyone who works with words green with envy, and the exact same thing happened to him as happened to Woody Allen in those years: he made his finest films, but the critics failed to notice because they were too busy sighing, ‘Ah, but he’s not the same as he was in the 1970s’. (A question left unasked—but then again, it wasn’t really a question.) “I’m no longer capable of writing my own songs, and besides, I’m not a lyricist. A songwriter – I don’t want to say ‘poet’ because that’s too grand a word.” Guccini tells me off when I say it’s baffling to think he’s made an album of songs written by others, he who is Italy’s greatest lyricist. He says that “a lyricist is a craftsman; he can reach excellent levels, but he sits there, faced with a piece of music, and puts it together: I’m not capable of writing a song if someone asks me to’ (passionate and genuine, in true Rete Tre style), and now ‘it’s clear that I’ve said what I needed to say’, and the very idea of writing songs doesn’t even cross his mind, ‘after L’ultima Thule I haven’t touched a guitar since’. I tell him that a few months ago Paolo Conte said something similar to me: he used to sit down at the piano once a day; now he walks past it and looks at it as if it were a stranger. He says: ‘You get tired of it’; I think: ‘And what are we to do now?’; I ask him if there are any unpublished songs in his drawers; he says: ‘Not a single one.’ I blurt out: ‘And what am I to do?’ ‘Read books.’

Guccini says that the lyricist is the one who adapted "La tieta", a Catalan song, turning it into "Bugiardo e incosciente", which ‘has absolutely nothing to do with it’. But it’s beautiful. ‘It may well be beautiful, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the original lyrics, which are about a spinster aunt’. I suspect he doesn’t even like being called a singer-songwriter. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. Becoming a singer-songwriter happened by chance, by coincidence.” Like everyone born before the days of mobile phones, Guccini used to read as a child: we had no other pastime available. “Just to read, I’d read some utterly shameful rubbish. Ever since I was a lad, I’d dreamt of becoming a writer when I grew up. I worked as a journalist for a couple of years because I dreamt of being the sort of journalist who goes on to write a novel. There was a certain Cavicchioli, I think, a journalist who’d written a book, I voli del tacchino: I was green with envy. Then there was a poet I met in Bologna who published an experimental novel. There too, I saw it in the shop window: I was green with envy.” I avoid interrupting him by quoting him, but I think to myself: they’re more level-headed and discreet, and they get up to less nonsense than I do, writing songs in rhyme (and then again, at some point during the day he’ll tell me: ‘That’s why I say I’m not a lyricist: the songs are about me. But a song is never truthful. The truth is much more complex’). Envy of writers, as we were saying, and him who couldn’t get published, until “I pieced a few things together, including a novel by Luigi Meneghello, “Libera nos a malo”, reading Gadda, “Il Pasticciaccio”, and then “Pàvana”. “Pàvana” left such a lasting impression on me that Lorenz’s geese would laugh at it. And then the vocabulary – I was interested in the vocabulary. Quote: ‘puppeteer of words’. I say to him: ‘Thanks for quoting yourself; that way I don’t have to play the usual role of the fanatic.’ Dialect is a luxury of Guccini’s adult life; as a child, his family spoke it but he didn’t: ‘We never spoke it because, as children, my peers weren’t allowed to speak dialect – they’d be told off; Italian identity took precedence.’ (Guccini was born during that minor hardship known as the Second World War: nothing comparable to the hardships of today that warrant a psychologist’s fee, for heaven’s sake). So teenagers after the war didn’t use the dialect, but “in Modena we spoke in slang. ‘Today it’s slinza, today it’s raining.’ For us in Modena in the 1950s, a girl was ‘la mina’; if you didn’t have ‘la mina’, you wouldn’t be invited to parties. The parties you couldn’t get into without a ‘mina’ were the ones organised by the girls; maybe there were cousins visiting, but otherwise you needed a ‘mina’ to take part. Once, Flaco, my Argentine guitarist, turned up with a friend and his girlfriend, and introduced me to his ‘mina’, because there’s a lot of immigration from Emilia to Argentina, so they use the same slang.” Nowadays, the dialect is a refuge for those who love words: “Italian has been worn thin; it’s been worn down by television. There isn’t a single noun without an adjective: ‘magical’ – everything’s ‘magical’.”

So Guccini has returned to his roots, to the areas where 16th-century documents record a certain “Guccino da Montagu”, whose profession was that of a “munaro” (miller). “I’d have liked to have come here many years earlier, when I was younger. I can no longer go mushroom-picking, go for walks or tend to the vegetable patch a bit. I’ve arrived too late.” His life, as is often the case, is no longer the one described in the papers; then there’s the coffee at the station to sober up from the wine. “I go to bed at the same time I used to leave the house. All the friends I used to hang out with as a lad are dead or dying. You can still play cards in Pàvana, in theory: in practice, there are no players left. And, if there are any, they’re semi-professionals who’ll tear you to pieces if you make a mistake.”

His houses are full of books (the old ones remained in Bologna, on Via Paolo Fabbri, but – despite him saying in every interview that he has lost his sight and can no longer read – publishers continue to send new releases to his address in Pàvana). “For me, achieving success meant being able to buy all the books I wanted and all the cigarettes I wanted. I gave up smoking five years ago, and I can no longer see or read.” Perhaps you’ve already answered this in “Autunno”, in that line that evoked “that dull gnawing that changes ‘I do’ into ‘I remember’”, but Woody Allen, in an old film, asked whether a memory is something we have or something we’ve lost. “We have. Both, but we have.”

Guia Soncini (Bologna, 1972), writer. Her publications include, amongst others, «I mariti delle altre» (Rizzoli, 2013, Forte dei Marmi Prize), «L’era della suscettibilità» (Marsilio, 2021) and «L’economia del sé» (Marsilio, 2022). Her latest book is «Questi sono i 50» (Marsilio, 2023).