Viva l'Italy

The sun setting on the 1970s – that formidable, ferocious decade of imagination in power, but also of political struggle, terrorism and state massacres – prompted a reckoning, a settling of accounts. What was left of anti-fascist Italy, of its founding, unifying values, of its democratic antibodies? Francesco De Gregori would manage to tell that story in the boldest possible way. With a ballad running a serious risk of being misread. And which, indeed, would almost always be misread. Or pulled by the sleeve. By the left, and even by the right.

Viva l'Italy was a song with a troubled gestation. The very idea behind it was already a gamble – a title that could evoke jingoistic, revanchist overtones, coming from one of the great singer-songwriters of the Italian left – let alone that epic, popular, slightly naive guise, put through the wringer by a guru of rock history like Andrew Loog Oldham. Which raises the question: what was the manager who launched the Rolling Stones doing in RCA's Rome studios? Let's rewind the tape…

It's 1979, and De Gregori has been holed up in the studio for weeks with his musicians, recording his new album. But he can't get anywhere. Too many misunderstandings and arguments. The songs are there, but they don't work: they're limp, lacking backbone. Even Ennio Melis, RCA's boss and considered the "father" of Italian singer-songwriters, admits as much: to break the impasse, he suggests the name of an old, illustrious acquaintance of his. De Gregori is thrilled, but also puzzled: what does someone like Andrew Loog Oldham have to do with the Italian cantautori tradition? "I'd met Oldham here in Rome in May, and we'd decided to work together on my next record," the Prince will recall. "At first the project was very ambitious: I was even supposed to record in various parts of the United States depending on the sound or genre of each song. Even though I was fascinated by the idea, I wasn't entirely convinced, I was a bit afraid of working in America, a country I love as a tourist but wouldn't say I love quite as much for professional reasons. Andrew immediately picked up on that feeling, and for fear that I might lose my Italian identity, and above all for fear that I'd come across as an emigrant – an image that so many of my colleagues who go over there end up giving off – he preferred to redirect the whole thing to Rome." Several tracks were also recorded in English, translated by Susan Duncan Smith, who had previously worked with the De Angelis brothers' Oliver Onions. The idea was later dropped, though, and the English-language tracks have only ever surfaced as bootlegs.

And it really was that English gentleman, together with his retinue of legendary musicians (among them Mitch Mitchell, drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, plus Phil Spencer on guitars, Mike Neville on bass, Jerry Shirley on drums and Tommy Eyre on keyboards), who, between laughs and bottles of Peroni, managed to square the circle of the entire 1979 album. "'Viva l'Italy' is the record that cost me the most effort," the Roman singer-songwriter will admit. "I made it and threw it away a couple of times. Maybe it was some bad astral alignment or who knows what: the fact is I've got a box at home full of tapes with all the discarded arrangements for these songs. Then Oldham showed up with this half-English, half-American band, and in a couple of weeks we made the whole record."

And the most troubled track of all was the very one that would give the whole collection its title. "Take a song like 'Viva l'Italy', for instance… After writing it with that epic melody and that almost Verdi-like riff, I was embarrassed to record it that way," De Gregori will recall in an interview with Paolo Vites. "I'd tried to hide that side of it, which was actually the song's whole point. I suppose I was trying to make it sound a bit more like a rock song, and obviously that couldn't work. Oldham, on the other hand, played up exactly the popular soul of that melody: he heard that riff and had it played on bagpipes, a folk instrument par excellence, common in a way to both the English and Italian traditions. It was Columbus's egg, the thing I hadn't managed to figure out."

The result would become one of the undisputed masterpieces of De Gregori's entire songbook. A stately, solemn ballad, with that spine-tingling breath of bagpipes weaving through the slow, half-echoing recitation, swelling into a choir, before the sudden blues break and the final eruption of Lucio Dalla's saxophone. The melodic core of the sung part is as bare-bones as the arrangement of the instrumental passages is epic and exhilarating, and it's from this magical contrast that the song truly takes flight.

The lyrics, built from fragmented, dazzling lines, survey thirty years of Italian history: the Resistance and liberation from Nazi-Fascism ("l'Italy liberata"), the corruption and speculation that followed the economic boom ("l'Italia derubata e colpita al cuore", "l'Italia assassinata dai giornali e dal cemento"), the Years of Lead and subversive terrorism ("l'Italia con gli occhi asciutti nella notte scura"), the strategy of tension and the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre ("l'Italia del 12 dicembre"). What emerges is a chiaroscuro portrait of a country "half garden and half prison", built through an anaphoric, allegorical sequence forever playing on antithesis, on ambivalence. Somewhere between pity and detachment, nostalgia and anger, irony and flashes of pride. There's the dimension of a carefree innocence now lost (the little Italy "of the waltz" and "of coffee"), that of abandonment ("l'Italia dimenticata") but also of a necessary forgetting ("l'Italia da dimenticare"), the healthy, popular soul ("l'Italia che lavora, l'Italia che si dispera e l'Italia che si innamora") and the reckless, credulous one ("l'Italia metà dovere e metà fortuna"). But the final verse, dredging up one of the most tragic chapters in the dark night of the Republic, suddenly softens the shadows, letting a hope of rebirth surface through the bitterness:

Viva l'Italy

l'Italy del 12 dicembre

l'Italy con le bandiere

l'Italy nuda come sempre

Italy with eyes open in the sad night

viva l'Italy

the Italy that resists

This is the sequence that catches in the throat, and perhaps the true conceptual heart of the song. "There was terrorism in those years, but the song reflects the terrible period of the Seventies," De Gregori would explain many years later. "In my intentions it wasn't an anthem but a tribute to a country that had nonetheless shown it had antibodies to react to all of this. So, a beloved country. Now I certainly still love this country, though perhaps I have less faith in its antibodies. Even back then, Viva l'Italy sounded a bit strange. […] Nationalism was tied to right-wing culture, so the fact that I, who belong to another tradition entirely, wrote Viva l'Italia could have sounded ironic, but in reality it was an act of love for this country. I was thinking of that Italy that took to the streets to oppose those who instead wanted to shut this Italy indoors. I'm thinking of the demonstrations after the massacres, after bombs like Piazza Fontana"10. Not to mention the fact that Viva l'Italia was always the last farewell in the letters of the Resistance fighters condemned to death. An anthem with a clear political stance, in short.

And yet, paradoxically, everyone would find something to love in Viva l'Italy. Bettino Craxi fell for it, and after singing it accompanied on guitar by De Gregori himself during an unusual evening at Lucio Dalla's house, he tried to turn it into the soundtrack of the Socialist Party's next election campaign (only to be good-naturedly blocked by the singer-songwriter's entourage). Then the post-fascist MSI tried to claim it for itself, with breathtaking cheek (a move that ended up straight in court). It even became an unwitting slogan against Lega secessionism, thanks to a line ("Viva l'Italia, l'Italia tutta intera") that had actually been written purely for the rhyme. And naturally it was seized upon by countless gatherings of the communist and post-communist left. But in truth, De Gregori granted permission to use the song only once: for the referendum of 25 and 26 June 2006, in support of the No campaign defending the 1948 Constitution.

The song's fate of being co-opted, however, would not stop there. Which is why, several years later, De Gregori would say that Viva l'Italy still seems "new" only because the country hasn't changed for the better.

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23/02/2026