Antonello Venditti

Antonello Venditti's "Cuore" is still beating strong. Forty years on, the Roman singer-songwriter's tenth album, released on 20 July 1984, hasn't lost an ounce of its shine, even though it isn't, all things considered, his best work. That accolade probably belongs to "Under the Sign of Pisces", released six years earlier, or to the previous "Lilly" from 1975. Still, it's also true that the 1984 record swam against the current in a way, and that's precisely where its strength lies: it was "easy" to be politically engaged in the Seventies, far less so in the Eighties. Not to mention that "Cuore" is made up of eight potential singles, most of which have become not just classics of the Roman singer-songwriter's repertoire, but part of the collective heritage, evergreens of Italian song in general.

Venditti is naturally a romantic, a sentimentalist, but he's no nostalgic traditionalist. At the press event presenting the reissue of the album discussed here (the special edition came out in June with the addition of the previously unreleased track "Di' una parola"; the album will also come back to life on the "Notte prima degli esami 1984-2024 40th anniversary" tour), when asked to comment on the current international situation, he simply replied: "Listen to the people who know what they're talking about, to historians - the rest is just superstructure".

In truth, he has always had a bent for historicizing - that "vice" of the twentieth century which today we're recklessly trying to shake off by every means possible - and "Cuore", released right in the very "heart" of the Eighties, also serves to stir up shared memory, not out of nostalgic indulgence but to better understand the present. In short, a work that speaks to its own time yet still feels relevant today. We're in the age of Reaganite hedonism, of Milano da bere, of disengagement, individualism, social climbing, opportunism. Italy has just emerged from the dark years of the Anni di piombo, people seem to want nothing but fun, the well-off are growing in number, and so is consumption. These are times of repression, of emotional and ideological detachment from the protests and the great social and civil battles that defined the previous decade. Now what's passed from mouth to mouth are slogans dreamed up by marketing geniuses, what echoes are advertising jingles, the little tune from Drive In. Commercial TV is an established, pervasive, inescapable reality - the Biscione is here to stay. Looking back is for losers. Long live the future, and above all the present, which is there to be drunk up too, naturally.

So what does Venditti do? He couldn't care less, and he looks back plenty, though not too far back, mind you. Well, actually, "Io mi ricordo quattro ragazzi con la chitarra e un pianoforte sulla spalla" is personal memory, harking back to the almost archaic days of the Folkstudio (the four are himself, Francesco De Gregori, Ernesto Bassignano and Giorgio Lo Cascio, singer-songwriters from the Roman scene who launched their respective careers together). But, looking closely, that's the furthest back in time the album ever reaches, along with the 1968 student protests evoked in "Qui" (“Valle Giulia ancora brilla la luna/ E Paola prende la mia mano/ Caduta per sbaglio sui nostri vent’anni/ Tesi come coltelli, come fratelli”). Everything else is more recent material, still part of a lived experience that is at once political and personal, public and private.

In "Cuore" there's no boundary between the collective and the individual dimension. And yet, this album would earn Venditti plenty of criticism. He was accused of having crossed to the other side of the barricade, of going from politically engaged singer-songwriter to commercial phenomenon, of having sold out. Accusations that seem almost laughable today, if we consider what commercial music means in our own time - especially on the Italian scene - and how often it now comes across as degraded and banal.

"Cuore" was released on July 20, 1984. Those were tense weeks. A month and a half earlier, Berlinguer had died, and seven years later Antonello would dedicate "Dolce Enrico" to him, a track featured on the album "Benvenuti in Paradiso". About ten days before the death of the Italian Communist Party's secretary, on May 30, Venditti himself — voice and historical conscience of Roma's fanbase — had held the famous concert at Circo Massimo, split into two parts: one before kickoff of the European Cup final between Roma and Liverpool, played not far from there at the Olympic Stadium, and the other after the end of those devastating (for Roma fans) 120 minutes plus penalty kicks. On that occasion the Roman artist performed live what would become the opening track of his forthcoming album, the (trans)generational anthem "Notte prima degli esami", a song that has rightfully entered popular culture but also carries literary references (the quotes from Dante and Ariosto in the lyrics are anything but incidental). The song is like a compressed film sung at the piano (before the full-band explosion at the end), a script filled with memories of a lifetime intertwined with numerous subplots — stories of students facing their final exams, their families, their teachers — but, as usual, there's no shortage of nods to the political climate of the time (terrorism and the massacres of the "evening bombs," the Cold War evoked in "E gli aerei volano in alto tra New York e Mosca"). Had drones existed back then, a fitting image for this song would have been a remote-controlled aircraft that, on the night before the final school exam, moves from window to window, pausing for a few minutes to peer inside homes and snap pictures of a varied and, naturally, sleepless humanity, each person getting ready, in their own way, for the fateful test.

No drones, but if we want to stretch it, the future is likewise foretold in "Mai nessun video mai," which in a way anticipates the intangibility so typical of today's digital age. In the song, which expresses a rejection of the temptation to replace tactile reality with cathode-ray perception at the expense of physical experience, the cult of image and appearance is swept away by the need to live human contact ("Rimane qui, come un miracolo, la stessa voglia di cantare/ Mai nessun video mai mi potrà ricordare"). And yet, on the album cover, what stands out is precisely a screen, its blue light illuminating a hat resting nearby on the table. Perhaps it's the very screen sung about in the song ("Questo schermo azzurro è ancora il cielo/ E sullo schermo ci sei tu"). To a film buff, the image might suggest the poster of a movie combining two staples of 80s nerd imagery: the television from "Videodrome" or the computer screen from "WarGames," paired with the hat from "Indiana Jones". Even in a choice like this — perhaps unintentional in this case — the album is very much in step with its time.

The aforementioned "Qui" is also overflowing with 80s sound, specifically musically speaking: it's the moment when Venditti definitively veers toward synth-pop, embracing certain sonic hallmarks of the decade (even though the two previously discussed tracks are hardly shy about it either), while still refusing, across the board, to give in to easy trends — after all, no fewer than eleven flesh-and-blood musicians (including the artist himself) took part in making this record, so much for "fake" sounds. And if the album as a whole still sounds fresh today, it's not simply because it loaded up on synthesizers and drum machines, but because, quite simply, it's expertly crafted, with blood, sweat and tears.

"Non è la cocaina," which in 1986 would feature on the soundtrack of Carlo Verdone's film "Troppo forte," tells us instead that there's a drug more powerful than white powder: "Innamorarsi ancora, innamorarsi a Roma". The spread of drugs was a hot topic at the time. Exactly three months before the album's release, a drug case had involved another icon of Italian songwriting. On April 20, Vasco Rossi was arrested in a club near Bologna for cocaine possession and spent 22 days in prison. "Only Fabrizio De André came to visit me," the author of "Bollicine" would later recall.

In cases like these, then, "Ci vorrebbe un amico," as the title of the fifth track on the album goes. Venditti sang it live for the first time at that very celebration — the massive gathering of Roma fans at Circo Massimo. A celebration that, as mentioned, turned into grief. And so "a friend would come in handy" even to recover from such a sporting heartbreak. In truth, though, the song is dedicated to Lucio Dalla, without whom Venditti's career (and probably his life) might well have come to a halt years earlier. After the album "Buona Domenica," in fact, Antonello, even at the peak of his artistic arc, had to face a serious personal crisis brought on by his separation from his wife, Simona Izzo. The depression that followed even led him to contemplate suicide, an outcome fortunately avoided thanks to Dalla's friendship, who among other things convinced him to end his self-imposed exile in Brianza — a move originally suggested by the Bolognese songwriter himself — and helped him find a place in the center of Rome. Once back in the capital, Antonello began writing hit songs again, starting with the famous "Grazie Roma" (which, contrary to popular belief, wasn't written to celebrate the 1983 league title but to pay tribute to the city that had welcomed him back).

The sardonic "L'ottimista," on the other hand, is one of Our Man's last political/satirical outbursts. The song takes aim at socialist leader Bettino Craxi and his scheming clique, who had been running the country for a year by then. Once again, though, it feels like reading the future: "Ha uno sguardo serio e corrucciato quando parla a lungo dello Stato/ Ma poi s'illumina d'immenso quando viene l'ora di pranzo," the lyrics go — words that, with hindsight, can't help but point to what would happen eight years later, when that whole political-business trough, cutting across nearly every Italian party, would be exposed by the Mani Pulite investigation.

"Piero e Cinzia," for its part, looks back once again. Once more, a personal story — the love affair between the two protagonists reaching its end — intertwines with a collective one, as the backdrop is the historic Bob Marley concert at San Siro on June 27, 1980, the day "Milano was Jamaica."

Closing out the tracklist is "Stella," which bids us farewell with a prayer: “Donaci la pace ai nostri simili/ Pane fresco da mangiare/ Proteggi i nostri sogni dalla vita quotidiana/ E salvali dall’odio e dal dolore”. Since 1992 (once again, the annus horribilis of recent Italian history), the song has regularly been dedicated during concerts to judges Falcone and Borsellino and their respective bodyguards, as well as to all victims of the Mafia. Writing a perfect song as a dedication for something that hadn't happened yet: here too, Venditti proved remarkably prescient, even if, this time around, he would have gladly done without being right.

The influence that "Cuore," and Antonello Venditti in general, have had on the music of later generations is considerable and still often not fully acknowledged. The Venditti of this period is regarded as one of the inspirations behind today's it-pop, if not its godfather outright — just think of the style of Thegiornalisti and later of their frontman Tommaso Paradiso in his solo career, or the work of Coez. Whether you like them or not, they're prominent figures of the new Italian pop scene. "Fake-indie Italian music is basically the worst of Venditti," Manuel Agnelli once said, "the worst of Venditti done badly too, because it's made by people who can't sing or play." Paradiso's own reply was caustic: "The worst of the worst Venditti is still better than the best of Agnelli." But references to Antonello among today's singer-songwriters are plentiful. Among many examples, it's worth mentioning the music video for Calcutta's "Frosinone," which echoes that of "Grazie Roma," or the resemblance between the verse of Giorgio Poi's "Tubature" and "Ricordati di me," not to mention the cover of "Notte prima degli esami" performed by Gazzelle and Fulminacci at Sanremo 2024. For this reason too, 40 years on, "Cuore" is still beating strong. Much to the dismay of its many detractors.

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04/03/2026