Just as Guccini has always taken great care with his words

Forever yours, forever yours, Guccini.

Like Cyrano de Bergerac, like Madame Bovary, like Ulysses – for whom Guccini found other words and presented them to us in a way that felt closer to home, so very Emilian, deeply human yet always immortal. And so Guccini is still ours, forever ours, because he brought us nostalgia and the search for lost time, when, though still far too young, we had lost nothing yet, yet we still felt an ache here, the euphoria of a disillusionment not yet arrived, and that ultimate question: but time, time – who will give it back to me?

Guccini has crafted his words in such a way that we can never be grateful enough to him, for having made us slaves to so many unforgettable verses and to a familiar lexicon that serves to explain so many things about life (and, sadly, about death): all those songs we know by heart the moment the first note or the first syllable is played, the 1970s alongside the 1990s, the images of a bygone world that has become more beautiful, more significant – above all within that precise sense of longing – thanks to him, who first wrote it down and then sang it.

“Words are my trade, my passion, my hobby.” Guccini was at primary school; he read the "Corriere dei Piccoli", then read "Pinocchio" (his first book) and wanted to become a writer. At home, he had a small shelf which the family called a ‘bookcase’.

The schoolteacher met a father and son in the street one afternoon after school and asked, ‘But what does this lad want to be when he grows up?’ And the father, an industrial technician – the first in the family for centuries not to be a miller – replied (who knows whether with pride or scepticism): ‘He wants to be a writer.’ The teacher laughed and said, ‘Forget it; he’s rubbish at writing.’ Well then, Mr Guccini, go on then. If you needed encouragement, here’s your encouragement. If you needed discouragement, here’s your discouragement. If you needed motivation, Guccini certainly had that too: a hunger for money for books and cigarettes. And a hunger for revenge against the schoolteacher and, later on, against a literary world that didn’t always live up to its own airs and graces.

In his songs, Guccini did what Hemingway explained to Fitzgerald in his letters of reproach and encouragement: ‘Invention is the most beautiful thing, but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. This is what we must do when we are at our best: invent everything, but invent it in such a true way that it could only happen just like that’. Guccini’s songs are exactly that: stories that could only happen that way, characters who could only be that way, act that way, walk down the stairs that way, swear that way, pine and make love that way, for Judas’s sake. Guccini, who at the age of thirty had never been to Rome; Guccini, who did not want to write songs like a paper tissue that someone uses and throws away, like phrases written merely to utter syllables, but who possessed that marvellous provincial arrogance, that mythomania essential for changing things: to write something that endures, to set words in motion as a nucleus from which other words are born, to construct the epic of the Via Emilia just as Sartre did for Paris (starting from a less favourable position, of course, but also with far greater freedom). In his autobiography, Le parole, Sartre says: “Every man has his natural place; neither pride nor valour determines its height: it is childhood that decides. My place is a sixth-floor flat in Paris overlooking the rooftops’. If that is the case – and perhaps it is precisely so – Guccini’s childhood determined the utmost power – lyrical, imaginative, literary, real – for Bologna, Pavana, Modena, and the highest place in the world for ‘il maestrone’, as everyone called him. Guccini wrote quickly but then spent a long time editing: he needed – to give it to us – the right word, and in fact he didn’t like ‘cantautore’: an ugly word invented by journalists in a hurry. He could no longer read books; he was blind. He could no longer smoke cigarettes; he’d had to give them up. But this isn’t part of the myth; it’s part of life.

So here it is now, that lost time: the time when Guccini took to the stage and wrote songs that could only have been written in that way – so genuine, so cultured without seeming to be. The time when he would chat, play cards, and we’d seek him out first in the taverns of Bologna, then seek our own time and even our own blindness within all his songs, within those words. We’d get angry (I still get angry) with those who don’t feel that very pain, right there, at that precise point, at sea level. And so, forever yours, forever yours, forever yours, Cirano.