D’Alema: “La Locomotiva was a song of despair. The opposite of the PCI. Guccini, an original who didn’t like the PCI”

Has Massimo D’Alema ever hummed Guccini’s ‘Locomotiva’? ‘It was a desperate song, which ended in a crash, in death. That song is the exact opposite of the Left, of the Italian Communist Party’s way of thinking. The Left was joy, a zest for life: Gino Paoli’s ‘Il cielo in una stanza’, De Gregori’s ‘La storia siamo noi’, and then Lucio Dalla and Antonello Venditti. Mind you, we liked love songs too. We didn’t just have singers of sadness, that hackneyed literary genre. Guccini was a musical companion on our journey, but he had nothing of the official Left about him. He wasn’t a communist, he wasn’t a party member, he was critical of the Italian Communist Party. He was an original, the interpreter – alongside Giovanna Marini – of highbrow music.” And yet, in the communists’ collective imagination, there was "La Locomotiva", “hurled like a bomb against injustice”, just as there is still the image of Berlinguer, his glasses, Occhetto’s jacket, D’Alema’s moustache – his own. D’Alema then falls silent for almost a minute, letting out a very slight cough. Did he know him? “We were never friends,” and then, as if to clarify, to set the record straight, he recalls: “Guccini was a socialist, even before Democrazia Proletaria. He never had any sympathy for the Communists.”

And did D’Alema have a soft spot for singer-songwriters? “As secretary of the FGCI, we brought together the singer-songwriters of our generation in Ravenna.” The first Communist president to lead a government uses the phrase “we were young back then” and suggests taking a look at his family photo album. “It was 1976, and De Andrè, Paoli, Guccini, Venditti and De Gregori came to Ravenna to perform. They were all there; it was a truly memorable occasion. Singer-songwriters have always been the PCI’s comrades-in-arms, and then there were those who chose to become active party members. I’m thinking of Gino Paoli, who wanted to stand for election and was elected on the Italian Communist Party ticket. He was a Member of Parliament, a very serious one. I was the group leader, and Paoli chose the Transport Committee to deal with port policy. I remember him. I remember his commitment, his work. We were friends. Paoli was keen to call himself a communist.”

It is clear that his preference lies with Paoli and, almost as if making a confession, he repeats: “We communists liked love songs, whilst ‘La Locomotiva’ was the desperate anthem of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Guccini is part of the history of my generation, a generation that was politically active and then became the ruling class, even if it later pretended to have forgotten all about it”. Are there such things as forgetful left-wingers? “There are, and there are also repentant journalists, the renegades.” Who has lost their memory? “I don’t feel like naming names.” I tell him, then, that I have a duty to ask, and D’Alema replies: “That’s something a lot of people say to me: ‘President, I have a duty to ask.’ Do you know what the real privilege is? To say: ‘And I’m lucky enough not to have to answer you.’ But you were talking to me about Guccini…”

Doesn’t today’s left, with its divisions on foreign policy, resemble the ‘Locomotiva’? D’Alema replies: “Not at all. Look, in America the left is thriving. In Michigan, Abdul El Sayed won the primaries. The left has a bright future ahead of it. Guccini – now that you mention it – was a libertarian socialist, opposed to national solidarity. It was only later that he moved closer to the PD and voted for us.” I ask him who D’Alema would vote for in the primaries between Schlein and Conte, but the communist who was “in Moscow, the last time” – as the title of his diary, about his trip with Berlinguer, puts it – replies that this question is off-script. Is the Italian left, like "La Locomotiva", "racing, racing towards its death"? D'Alema, who is tempted to hang up the phone, emphasises that "the left can win the elections" and that this "is the country of the racist right, governed by Maga Magò". Meloni? "Maga Magò".

Once again, he falls silent, and the seconds seem to drag on endlessly, as if he’d ended the conversation – were it not for the fact that you can still hear his breathing, almost like a faint puff of wind: “The Left can win. There’s a wave of youthful enthusiasm, and it was evident in the referendum on justice. Look, Meloni lost the referendum because of the young people. It’s the young people outraged by the massacres of the Palestinian people, who oppose wars.” Re-armament too? “Re-armament and war. The problem for the centre-left is how to give political shape to that sentiment, but this has nothing to do with Guccini any more. We’d started with "La Locomotiva"… What is the song of the left? Who is the singer-songwriter of the communist story? “If he weren’t too snobbish to admit it, that singer-songwriter is De Gregori, and his ‘La storia siamo noi’ is the song of the communist people.” And what is the song that D’Alema sang, the love song? “I sang ‘Azzurro’. ‘Azzurro’ is my song.”