Fabrizio De André

The news, especially crime reporting, often gave Fabrizio De André stories to turn into songs. Murders, suicides, trials, prison, violence and oppression run through his catalogue, but almost never as mere reportage: De André rewrote events from the point of view of the downtrodden, giving dignity and a voice to those who occupied only a few lines in the newspapers. It was an approach also shaped by his beloved French chansonniers, above all Georges Brassens, who were able to blend compassion, irony and social critique while telling the stories of people on the margins of society.
“La canzone di Marinella,” written in 1963 and released the following year on the single “Valzer per un amore/La canzone di Marinella,” is perhaps the most famous example of this poetic transfiguration. Behind the fairy tale of the young woman swept away by the river lies an actual crime story, although the identity of the victim who inspired De André has never been established with certainty.

The Girl from the Tanaro

In 1993, De André gave Luciano Lanza a first, detailed account of the song's genesis: “‘La Canzone di Marinella’ wasn't written by chance, simply because I wanted to tell a love story. It's exactly the opposite. It's the story of a girl who lost her parents at sixteen, a country girl from around Asti. She was thrown out by her aunts and uncles and started walking the banks of the Tanaro, and one day she met a man who tore her handbag from her arm and threw it into the river, and since I couldn't do anything to give her life back, I tried to change her death. That's how ‘La canzone di Marinella’ came about, which, if you like, also has its own deeply hidden social motivations. I wanted to completely mystify Marinella's fate. There's no other way to read it except as a doomed love story; if you don't tell the backstory, it's impossible for anyone to think that at its root there was a very serious social issue. Certain real facts, especially when I was young, disturbed me greatly, so I tried to change reality.”
Four years later, interviewed by Vincenzo Mollica, he returned to the story, this time pointing to a second possible river: “The song grew out of a kind of family novel applied to a girl who, at 16, had ended up working as a prostitute and was thrown into the Tanaro or the Bormida by a criminal. It was a crime story I had read about at fifteen in a local newspaper. That girl's story moved me so much that I tried to reinvent a life for her and soften her death.”

In this way, De André rescued the girl from the brutality of the news report, turning the murder into a fairy tale of love: Marinella isn't simply thrown into a river, but instead meets a king with no crown and no retinue, lives a single day like the roses, and is finally carried off by the wind above a star.

The Maria Boccuzzi Hypothesis

Alongside the songwriter's own account, another version of events has emerged. According to Asti-based psychologist Roberto Argenta, author of the 2012 book “Storia di Marinella… quella vera,” the story behind the song may be that of Maria Boccuzzi, reported by the Gazzetta del Popolo on January 29, 1953.
Born in Calabria in 1920 and moved to Milan with her family as a young child, Maria had worked as a factory hand at the Manifattura Tabacchi. After a romantic relationship ended badly and she broke off ties with her family, she tried her hand at variety theatre under the name Mary Pirimpò, before being forced into prostitution. On January 28, 1953, her body was found in the Olona river: she was 33 years old, had been hit by six gunshots, and was then thrown into the water. Despite the questioning of roughly two thousand people, the murder was never solved.
The similarities with the song are striking: the near-rhyme between Maria and Marinella, the prostitution, the violent death, the body left in the water. Yet equally significant discrepancies remain. De André spoke of a sixteen-year-old who lived near Asti and was thrown into the Tanaro or the Bormida, whereas Maria was 33 and was killed in Milan. What's more, in January 1953 the songwriter hadn't yet turned thirteen, while he recalled reading the news at fifteen. It's therefore possible that memory blurred together different places and dates, that the song was born from a mix of several real-life cases, or that the real Marinella was another woman who was never identified.

A Song Both Loved and Criticized

De André remained attached to the song also because of the perfect naturalness with which the words and melody seemed to hold each other up: “I feel a bond with this song because, regardless of its actual worth, I find there's a perfect balance between lyrics and music — you could almost say it sounds like a Neapolitan song written by a Genoese,” he would later say. That didn't stop him, though, from cutting it down to size with his usual irony. In 1969, faced with those who judged it too sentimental and rhetorical, he replied: “A little tablet crammed with rhetorical flourishes, that's true. Someone like me, when he's nearly thirty, has to consider that he has neither sick pay nor a pension: and family, good Lord, is a very concrete thing. So you think about earning a living too.”
In another interview from the same year, he tried instead to explain the reasons for its popularity: “I don't consider ‘La canzone di Marinella’ either worse or better than other songs I've written. It's just that songs divide into lucky ones and unlucky ones. Probably the fact that Marinella rhymed with words like bella or stella made it luckier than others.”

Mina and the Turning Point in His Career

De André's original recording made little commercial impact. The turning point came in 1967, when Mina performed “La canzone di Marinella” on the album “Dedicato a mio padre,” later releasing it as a single in February 1968. Her voice brought the ballad to a mass audience and played a decisive role in establishing the songwriter nationally. De André never forgot that gesture. In the liner notes for the compilation “Mi innamoravo di tutto,” he wrote: “If a miraculous voice hadn't performed ‘La canzone di Marinella’ in 1967, I would in all likelihood have finished my law degree and gone into practicing law. I thank Mina for stacking the deck in my favor, and above all in favor of my would-be clients.”
In 1997 the two reunited around the song, recording a precious duet version. The new recording was included as the sole unreleased track on “Mi innamoravo di tutto,” the last collection released by Fabrizio De André before his death: a kind of closing of the circle, thirty years after the performance that had changed his career.

A Proposal for a Plaque in Milan

Today Marinella's story is once again intertwining with current events. Alessandro De Chirico, a Forza Italy city councillor in Milan, has announced a motion to install a plaque dedicated to Maria Boccuzzi in Piazzale Stuparich, near the spot where her body was found in January 1953. “It's only right that Milan remember her and, through a plaque, tell her story. What better place than the walkway running through the flowerbeds of the new Piazzale Stuparich?” The councillor intends for the initiative to turn the memory of the victim into a message aimed at women still subjected to violence and exploitation: “I hope this initiative gives pause to women who are victims of exploitation, and that it can help them either to rebel or to choose a better path to follow.”
Even if it may never be possible to prove that Maria Boccuzzi truly was the Marinella imagined by De André, a plaque would have the merit of restoring a name and a story to a woman whom the news of the time had quickly consigned to oblivion.

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26/08/2026