Piave Blues. For Krano, dialect is a passport, not a barrier

Marco Spigariol, known by his stage name Krano, won the David di Donatello award for Best Original Song with “Ti”, written for Francesco Sossai’s “Le città di pianura”, for which he composed the entire soundtrack. He describes 2026 – which was supposed to be his breakthrough year – as something alien to him. “The world of cinema isn’t my world,” he says of the David di Donatello awards ceremony. “It’s a separate hemisphere, like a satellite.” And he says he’d rather make a new album than another film. Tonight he opens the concerts for the fourteenth edition of the Sponz Fest, “Sponz Im-Bosck”, conceived and directed by Vinicio Capossela in Calitri. But the live dates, which have multiplied since winning the award, take time away from what he loves: being in the studio, arranging, building an album one track at a time. He has returned to live in Valdobbiadene, after years spent in Turin. His return, however, does not seem a peaceful one. “I feel a bit cut off here,” he says, “you have to travel kilometres before you find anyone doing anything. Here, the Prosecco business reigns supreme”. And yet there is indeed a Venetian music scene – well-stocked and thriving – starting with the “Dischi sotterranei” roster, from Post-nebbia to Jesse The Faccio, from Laguna Bollente to C+C=Maxigross. And then there’s Julinko, a project by singer-songwriter Giulia Parin Zecchin, or Elli de Mon, the blues witch singing in dialect. Krano knows the scene, but doesn’t quite recognise himself in it: he feels close to it on paper, but far removed in reality.

With “Le città di pianura”, he was fortunate enough to enjoy a fair amount of creative freedom. He had to step into the shoes of three characters who weren’t his own: Doriano, Carlobianchi and Giulio. But the process, he explains, was turned on its head: the music came first, then the film. The work, ultimately, was similar to that on his first two albums – personal songbooks where he decided everything for himself. “It was the director who identified with my songs. Whilst I was writing, the film was still at the script stage, with no images for me to draw on.”

For Krano, the dialect he has been singing in for years serves as a code to break out of the Veneto region, like a passport to a wider audience. Some have interpreted this as an act of putting down roots, even attempting to co-opt Krano to align him with a local sovereignist agenda. Never has an idea been more misguided: an anarchist and instinctively hostile to the very notion of borders, he seeks a more musical sound, he says, even at the cost of sacrificing perfect diction. “Sometimes the dialect sounds better if you mess it up a bit. The literal meaning matters less than the mood. Those who don’t understand the lyrics still get something out of it, whilst those who do understand them risk getting bogged down in the words.”

When asked about his connection to artists such as Bill Fay or Skip Spence, who were only recognised after years of obscurity or following their deaths, he changes the subject: he isn’t looking for validation, he says; music is “a kind of salvation, a way of feeling better that has nothing to do with who’s listening. “The joyful sort makes me feel more uncomfortable than the sad sort, which really does help in difficult times.” In American slang, ‘having the blues’ refers to a permanent state rather than a passing melancholy: something you carry with you and find it hard to shake off completely. An underlying tone, independent of the subject – the Piave, a bereavement, the two poetic drunkards borrowed from a film. The blues roots stem from his first record label, a historic Mississippi-based one, he explains, and from a tour of the United States in the early 2000s, which he recalls as anything but idyllic. “On that tour, if you’re not American, you’re not looked upon favourably,” he says. “Board and lodging were never guaranteed: I often ended up sleeping in the van, except for one night in Atlanta, when the drummer from the Black Lips – on the same label – put me up out of sheer generosity.”

And so we return to the Piave, where everything should have remained – according to the most convenient interpretation of his music. Krano rejects this: he has never been tied to that river as a self-contained metaphor, a Venetian thing for Venetians. He wanted a universal message, one that could be exported. His dialect, in the end, is merely sound, rhythm, colour: raw material, not a coded message for small homelands. Anyone looking behind his words for an identity to claim comes away empty-handed, finding only the language with which, for years, he has been trying to break free.

Enrico Cicchetti