The kidnapping and the album "L'indiano"

In the mid-1970s, Fabrizio De André decided to withdraw from the scene. "I'm quitting singing and starting a farming commune in Sardinia", he told the stunned reporters of the magazine Nuovo Sound in February 1976. He was only 35 and fresh off the success of "Volume VIII", the album born from his collaboration with Francesco De Gregori. The Roman singer-songwriter had brought his signature urban-fable style to the table, while De André had put his sung poetry in service of achingly personal, autobiographical confessions – from "Amico fragile", a metaphor for anyone who resists in order to nurture their own solitary dreams, to the no less pointed "Giugno '73", an epitaph for the conventions of bourgeois marriage.

But that success was no longer enough for him. Weary of record-label obligations, the social whirl, and the public role that had been forced upon him, Faber was searching for something more authentic. He found it in Sardinia, in the countryside of Gallura, where he bought a large estate ten kilometers from Tempio Pausania: L'Agnata. A crumbling farmhouse, with no electricity or running water, tucked away in the Mediterranean scrub. In that remote place, De André wanted to rediscover freedom, solitude, and the down-to-earth reality of country life. "For him it was a way to recover the countryside around Asti that he'd lost in childhood – his wife Dori Ghezzi would later recall – to escape his upper-middle-class origins, to break free from an environment that all too often wants you to be a trained penguin".

But Sardinia also gave him the most harrowing experience of his life. On the evening of August 27, 1979, three armed, hooded men broke into L'Agnata, kidnapping Fabrizio De André and Dori Ghezzi. They loaded them into an orange Citroën Diane, then marched them on foot to one of those places Sardinians wryly nicknamed the "Hotel Supramonte": caves and makeshift shelters in the mountains. To be precise, on the slopes of Monte Lerno, near Pattada.

The two were held captive for four months, tied to an oak tree, guarded day and night by armed shepherds. Meanwhile, searches and negotiations unfolded in a frantic tangle, with moments that verged on the tragicomic, as in the anecdote recounted in the book "Amico fragile" by Cesare G. Romana, one of De André's biographers: "The blue jackets combed the Sardinian nature reserves hunting for clues and footprints: they even let state TV film them pretending to search for the two captives – guess where? In a little wood right next to their own house".

Only after the payment of a ransom of around 550 million lire, largely covered by De André's father, Giuseppe, was the couple freed: Dori on December 21 at 11pm, Fabrizio on the 22nd at 2am, three hours later.

After that harrowing ordeal, surprisingly, the two did not leave Sardinia. They went back to living at L'Agnata and turned down the police escort they were offered. "We've already been kidnapped once", De André said, "it's as if we're now immune to it". That choice, together with the words he would go on to say in the following years, revealed an attitude of understanding toward the kidnappers that startled public opinion, at a time when kidnappings were almost an everyday occurrence — consider that in the summer of '79 alone, bandits across Sardinia were holding as many as ten hostages at once. In a famous cartoon, Forattini depicted the island in the shape of a severed, bleeding ear. Cesare G. Romana wrote that De André had made himself guilty of the crime of "lese-bourgeoisie".

During the trial, De André did not join the civil case against the men who had physically carried out the kidnapping. He drew a distinction between them and those who had ordered it: the former were "two shepherds, two instruments", the latter "wealthy people who kidnapped to get richer, not to survive". On March 24, 1983, the members of the gang were sentenced by the court of Tempio Pausania to a total of 183 years in prison. And when, years later, one of his captors applied for a pardon, De André didn't hesitate to sign it.

That experience also gave rise to one of the most intense and profound works of his career: the album "Fabrizio De André" (1981), known as "L'indiano". Written together with Veronese singer-songwriter Massimo Bubola, the record weaves the memory of the kidnapping together with broader reflections on freedom and marginalization.

The image of the Native American on the cover became the symbol of a parallel that Fabrizio himself openly drew: "In those four months of captivity, I saw in them more of a tribe of Indians than the members of a criminal organization. And in their struggle for survival, I saw something similar to the fate of the Native Americans: on one hand I thought of the Indians wiped out by the likes of Custer and Chivington, ghettoized in reservations by the power that had plundered their lands; on the other, of the Sardinians, driven into the mountains first by the Carthaginians, then by the Romans, just like the redskins. Both robbed of their land, reduced to a people without a homeland, sacrificed to the greed of their invaders". According to De André, the attacks by Native Americans on the stagecoaches of the white invaders were, in the end, not so different from the kidnappings carried out by the Sardinian underworld against the wealthy: "Even the few Indians of Sardinia sometimes end up attacking the master's stagecoaches to take back part of what was stolen from them, especially when they're given no alternative. But is it really all their fault, or is it also the fault of the many Custers that the colonizer has sent against them, disguised as predatory tax men? I consider myself the victim of a handful of Sioux who had to prove their worth, and to whom the white man leaves no other way of earning a living".

On the record, then, the story of the extermination of Native Americans ("massacred by a rabble of drunkards not even dressed as soldiers", as De André would later put it) overlaps with the torn identities of defeated peoples; the quest for freedom fades into the only apparent solitude of the shepherds, who live in complete communion with nature. Songs like "Hotel Supramonte", "Quello che non ho" and "Fiume Sand Creek" reflect that vision: captivity becomes a metaphor for oppression, and forgiveness turns into a gesture that is at once political and deeply human.

But De André's words were once again misunderstood and condemned by the usual self-righteous voices. Conservative commentators such as Domenico Bartoli and Sergio Ricossa accused him of being a spoiled bourgeois, an intellectual with revolutionary pretensions, a victim of "Stockholm syndrome" – the supposed psychological identification of a victim with their captors. His forgiveness was branded as proof of moral weakness and of a snobbish attitude toward reality.

The Genoese singer-songwriter replied calmly, but firmly: "I wish certain Catos, certain people who tell me: 'You should have hanged them first and forgiven them later', could live through the experience we lived, and feel for themselves how important it is, in those conditions, to be treated with humanity. Even though they could have hurt us, they chose to treat us well. That's why I forgave them. If you find an excuse for someone who hurts you, you come out of it stronger. But if you experience it only as an offense, it destroys you". It was, in short, a way of staying true to his worldview — the same one that had led him, throughout his life, to sing for the weak, the oppressed and the marginalized. In those days at the "Hotel Supramonte", among other things, De André didn't even lose his proverbial sense of irony. As Dori Ghezzi recently recounted, when one of his kidnappers told him he actually preferred Guccini, De André shot back: "Then you should have taken him instead!".

In the years that followed, De André reaffirmed his choice to forgive on several occasions. During a visit to the Is Arenas juvenile prison in 1992, a boy asked him whether he would have come anyway, knowing that one of his kidnappers might be among them. "Yes, I would have come all the same," he replied. "If you choose to forgive, you have to forgive completely". The kidnapping and the forgiveness that followed left a deep mark on his life and his art. And Sardinia remained, for him, a deeply symbolic place, like a Sioux reservation: a land of silence and pain, but also of resistance. And in the end, as he put it with his usual paradoxical clarity, "I watched them during the kidnapping, and I thought that they were the ones who were truly held captive".

(Thanks to the site Spazio70.com for the valuable archival information)

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18/02/2026