The science of the opening line

It's a genuine “science of the opening line” that Francesco De Gregori has developed over more than fifty years of career. It's no coincidence that he took it (a little too) badly when Gianni Morandi trivialized the opening of “Buonanotte Fiorellino”. Often the first line introduces the protagonist, who may be the author himself in disguise (“Arlecchino”, “Il ragazzo”, “l'uomo che cammina sui pezzi di vetro”) or else quotes the song's title (“Alice”, “Fine”, “Giovane esploratore Tobia”, “La campana”, “Viva l'Italy”, “Terra e acqua”, “Generale” etc.). Other times it completely throws you off, leading you astray: “My father buried a year ago, no one left to tend the vine” (“Pablo”), “Rain falls and snow falls, I no longer have my virtue” (“Marianna al bivio”), “Planes belong to the sky, as ships belong to the sea” (“Renoir”). In other cases, finally, it's a quotation, whether biblical – “Ecco l'agnello di Dio, che toglie i peccati del mondo” (in “L'agnello di Dio”) – or even from the Sanremo Festival – “Prendi questa mano, zingara, dimmi pure che futuro avrò” (“Prendi questa mano, zingara”) – or from advertising, like “Le stelle sono tante, milioni di milioni” (“Niente da capire”), while the opposing openings of songs like “Finestre di dolore” (“La luce della luna ci trovò sopra un tetto”) and “Souvenir” (“Niente luna questa sera, niente gatti sopra il tetto”) sound entirely self-referential.

Rimmel (from “Rimmel”, 1975)

E qualcosa rimane

Between the light pages and the dark pages

And I erase your name from my facade

And I mix up my alibis and your reasons

A definitive watershed for the whole of Italian song. A worn snapshot of a farewell, the title track of the 1975 LP breaks free from any sentimentality, taking refuge instead in melancholy and disenchantment. Everything unfolds through clues, through narrative glimpses, always spare yet moving: "E qualcosa rimane, fra le pagine chiare e le pagine scure" ("And something remains, between the light pages and the dark pages"): nothing more than this is given to know. Defeat is admitted, with cynical resignation: "And I erase your name from my facade, e confondo i miei alibi e le tue ragioni" ("And I erase your name from my facade, and I mix up my alibis and your reasons"). A brilliant inversion of the usual post-breakup recriminations, in which the protagonist himself immediately turns himself in, admitting he has only "alibis" against the other's "reasons". And this won't be the only time.

Renoir (from "De Gregori", 1978)

Gli aerei stanno al cielo

Come le navi al mare

Like the sun on the horizon in the evening

How true it is that I don't want to go back

A una stanza vuota e tranquilla

Dove aspetto un amore lontano

A magnificent cartography of dreams and fantasies, where planes belong to the sky as ships belong to the sea. This is the opening of the two-faced song from the album "De Gregori", first thunderous and ramshackle (with Francesco himself on backing vocals), then wistful and utterly sweet, as if they were two readings of the same painting. With the image of separation at the centre of the scene. But departure never fully severs the thread of the story: the pain of farewell dissolves into the memory of that moment, as if something, mysteriously, had still remained (“la mattina che prese il treno e seduta accanto al finestrino/ vide passare l’Italy ai suoi piedi/ giocando a carte col suo destino”). Complete with a final self-defence against the usual "damned gossips", to borrow the words of Ivan Graziani ("Non è vero che io l'abbia perduta, dimenticata, come dice la gente").

Bufalo Bill (from "Bufalo Bill", 1976)

Il paese era molto giovane

i soldati a cavallo erano la sua difesa

il verde brillante della prateria

it clearly demonstrated the existence of God

of the god who designs the frontier

and builds the railroad

A few strokes of the pencil for the declamatory opening of one of the most celebrated De Gregori-esque portraits, that of William Frederick Cody, the boy "blond almost like Jesus", who "played rummy and whistled at women". The curtain rises on the promised land, an ancestral eden protected by its soldiers and by a reassuring divinity. Who, given the choice between life and death, wouldn't have chosen America? Born in the mid-19th century, Cody had earned the title of Buffalo Bill by hunting bison, but he was also "gullible and romantic". A wild spirit who rejects the "predetermined path" of the locomotive, a metaphor for the routine of industrial society. Like the buffalo, "he can veer sideways and fall". And fall he will, ending up crushed in the gears of the new American society, the one that will have him sign a contract to travel the world as a sideshow attraction in the Barnum Circus. The America of fake 32-tooth smiles, of pen-pushers taking the place of cowboys: a bitter parable of the frontier that De Gregori would even discuss with former US President Bill Clinton in a famous 2022 meeting.

Disastro aereo sul canale di Sicilia (from "Bufalo Bill", 1976)

It is moreover evident

Even in the climate of détente

That any attack on Arab countries

Sees Italy in the front line

One of the most political - and prophetic - episodes in De Gregori's songbook. Inspired by reading a Lotta Continua article on military spending in Italy, it tells the story of a young American Nato F-104 fighter pilot (corrosively defined as a "widow factory") who carries out his deadly missions. With the complicity of an eternally servile Italian ally, to whom the biting prologue is dedicated. But the "air disaster in the Sicilian Channel" - the crash of the Nato fighter jet in that stretch of sea - also sounds like the most prescient of prophecies about the Ustica massacre, 14 years ahead of time. On 27 June 1980, when Itavia's DC-9 broke apart in flight and vanished into the sea, many would recall those very lyrics. And who knows if it was precisely for this reason that Marco Risi called on De Gregori to write the soundtrack for his "Muro di gomma", the 1991 film that recounts the mysteries and cover-ups of one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Italian Republic.

Fine (from "Francesco De Gregori", 1974)

Fine

if you tell me you find some flowers in this story

they're yours

but it's no use looking for me under the table

I just can't stand it anymore

I took a few trains, a few ships, a few dreams

some time ago

Another scorching, caustic incipit, yet sunk into an abyss of melancholy. In the darkness of the room of memories, commemorating another love story that ended more or less like the one in "Rimmel". Written in one go, in that couple of hours of unbridled creativity that also produced "Niente da capire", "Fine" is one of De Gregori's lesser-known masterpieces. A marvel of restrained melody – the guitar that "gently weeps", the chime of the piano underlining a linear harmonic theme, now higher, now lower – and another spell of minimal lyrics. A farewell letter that stops right on the edge of nostalgia, just in time to hold back the tears, perhaps with the help of irony. With all the weakness of that tender parting: "Ma puoi chiamarmi ancora amore mio". All too intimate and moving to be sung live. And in fact it will never find a place in concert setlists.

Alice (from "Alice non lo sa", 1973)

Alice guarda i gatti e i gatti guardano nel sole

mentre il mondo sta girando senza fretta

Irene al quarto piano è lì tranquilla

che si guarda nello specchio e accende un'altra sigaretta

E Lili Marleen, bella più che mai, sorride

e non ti dice la sua età

ma tutto questo Alice non lo sa

Fired off like that, with no instrumental intro, it's one of those instant-knockout openings, introducing the first of a long series of De Gregori-esque female portraits. It matters little, then, to know who the protagonist is (Alice), or Irene on the fourth floor, still calm before her fate plays out in another song, or a celluloid Lili Marleen, vain and irresistible. Alice is an allegory of unawareness, of naivety, of the sweet passivity of youth. Like the protagonist of Lewis Carroll's novel hurled into the Wonderland of a hundred years later. Then that chorus, seemingly disconnected from the rest, that breathtaking melodic opening, over the delirious verses of the bridegroom who rebels, because "he's gone mad or he's been drinking", but who in the end won't shirk his duty. Maybe. Because everything is magically blurred, undefined, in a free-flowing jumble of images with an almost Dadaist touch, whisking into abstract verses all the artistic passions of the young De Gregori: Joyce's Ulysses, Pavese, Warhol's pop art, cubism and Dadaism, Kerouac's America, the Fellini of "8½", the Antonioni of "Blow-Up". "Alice" is the song that will break the Roman singer-songwriter through to the mainstream audience.

Titanic (from "Titanic", 1982)

La prima classe costa mille lire

the second, a hundred lire

the third, pain and fright

and the stench of sweat from the hatchway

and the smell of dead sea

Scenes of class struggle at the time of the Titanic. In the glittering saloons of the ocean liner, the social contradictions of an era explode, widening the gap between the first-class passengers, the wealthy bourgeois parvenus, and the proletarians, the emigrants and the dispossessed, forced to leave their homeland to escape starvation. De Gregori directs the scene with a filmmaker's mastery, celebrating, amid rumba and swing, the bouncing party beneath the “metal moon,” the carefree, oblivious face of the “black black ship” speeding toward disaster. A collective excitement of dreams and false emotions in which even the “peasants” feel treated “like gentlemen” (“this bunk feels like a double bed/ it's better than being in hospital”). “To get married you go to America,” “to avoid dying you go to America”: the social conflict, in the end, had never been summed up so effectively. Built on swaying Latin rhythms, with no chorus, and a riff vaguely reminiscent of an old South American tune (“Delicado”), the title track would become the calling card of “Titanic”.

A stoker's outfit (from “Titanic,” 1982)

Son, with what eyes, with what eyes must I look at you

With your trousers worn through at the seat and these brand-new shoes

Son with no tomorrow, with that look of a fleeing animal

And these tears on the shoreline that won't go away

Aboard the Titanic, De Gregori also brings along one of his historic idols from his Folkstudio days: Giovanna Marini. The best possible counterpoint for this flowing vocal duet, carried by the accordion, which tells a moving story of departures and farewells. The elegy of a mother's anguish that overflows from the grooves with throbbing intensity. In the exchange between mother and son unfolds the drama of uprooting for the one who will have to fuel that futurist marvel with soot and sweat. A device borrowed from the classic iconography of emigration stories, the kind found in “Mamma mia dammi cento lire che in America voglio andar…”. Even though the dialogue is imaginary: the ship has already sailed, while the mother, left alone on the dock, torments herself in a sort of belated reproach, a funeral lament for the son leaving “with no tomorrow,” with the “look of a fleeing animal,” trapped in the steel belly of the “black black ship,” plowing through the waters of “this cruel Atlantic.”

Pezzi di vetro (from “Rimmel,” 1975)

The man who walks on shards of glass,

they say has two souls and one sex,

a heart of hard wood.

And a moon and bonfires behind him,

as he dances and dances,

under the right angle of a star

Another portrait sketched in four brushstrokes. Complete with an anastrophe (the inversion of the usual order of a sequence of words) in the line “Di ramo duro il cuore”. De Gregori would later reveal that the song is autobiographical, referring to his youthful romantic misadventures. But such details are irrelevant in the face of a text that is nothing but a vertigo of emotions and suspensions. The man walking on broken glass is a street artist, cocky and mocking. A “barefoot saint,” dancing under the blessing of his own personal star, beneath his “right angle.” He's a Fellini-esque figure, an archetype of vitality, of youthful recklessness. But above all, he's the pretext for telling the story of the enchantment of falling in love, the small gestures and emotional nuances underlying romantic rapture. All wrapped in the visionary lyricism of the lyrics, dense with imagery and literary references (Pavese's “La luna e i falò,” Montale's “cocci aguzzi di bottiglia”), set within a sober, elegant musical frame, between the crystalline sound of an acoustic guitar, the dreamlike clarity of the fingerpicking, and the hushed tone of the vocals. Almost De Gregori's existential manifesto.

Due zingari (from “De Gregori,” 1978)

Ecco, stasera mi piace così

Con queste stelle appiccicate al cielo

La lama del coltello nascosta nello stivale

E il tuo sorriso trentadue perle

De Gregori always dodges the temptation of cheap political analysis, of maudlin rhetoric. So even when he frames in his lens a microcosm of decay and marginalization like that of “Due zingari,” he filters it through the distorting lens of dream, of fantasy. As in a Fellini film, illuminating details surface: “the blade of the knife hidden in the boot” and the girl's smile, “thirty-two pearls in the night.” A supernatural enchantment, straight out of magical realism (“two gypsies leaned against the night, maybe hand in hand, holding each other in their eyes”), which will shatter with the girl's abrupt departure. When the perspective suddenly widens onto the road, where “cars pass by quickly” and “trucks eat up miles.” A genuine cinematic cut, marking the break with the “urban dream” and the return to a reality of suburban desolation. The osmosis between the infinite sweetness of the melody and Lilli Greco's refined arrangements is a marvel of grace and balance.

Atlantide (from “Bufalo Bill,” 1976)

Lui adesso vive ad Atlantide

Con un cappello pieno di ricordi

Ha la faccia di uno che ha capito

E anche un principio di tristezza in fondo all'anima

He hides cans of desperate beer under the bed

And sometimes he thinks he's a hero

One of his typical in medias res openings that hurl the listener straight into the middle of the story, taking for granted that the beginning is already known and gradually providing the keys to piece the puzzle together. It's the admission of a defeat, of an (ir)responsibility, sublimated in the surreal reversal of roles of the unfaithful protagonist, who lets it be known that it's actually him forgiving his beloved "for having betrayed her." But while in other autobiographical songs, like "Rimmel" and "Fine," the confession unfolded in first person, here De Gregori steps out of the scene and gets behind the camera. "He" has sought refuge in the underground world, another place of the soul. He fled to California, tried to build a new life, but remained chained to a memory that keeps burning. So now he lives "in the third ray" and has learned his lesson. And in this dreamlike sequence of images, the unforgettable one stands out: the "cans of desperate beer" hidden under the bed, the brilliant personification that, in the most absurd of emotional transferences, manages to explain everything. The originality of the lyrics is matched by some of the most beautiful music the Prince ever composed: a slow, dreamlike sonic flow, between the celestial chimes of the piano, the dark mantle of the Eminent, subtle guitar arpeggios and an enveloping, deeply sad melody that could melt your heart. While there's no doubt about the debt owed to "Three Angels" by his mentor Bob Dylan, one can't help but recognize in "Atlantide" a uniquely evocative power.

Saigon (from "Alice non lo sa", 1973)

Donna giovane del Vietnam

com'è strano coltivare il mare

quanti fiori ti ha dato già

quanti altri te ne potrà dare

da qui a Saigon la strada è buona

Another polaroid from History. But even when he turns his gaze to collective destiny, De Gregori never abandons the individual angle, those cinematic subjective shots typical of his narrative style. The existential dimension of the person is the lens through which the focus widens onto History, because — as always in his work — it's the ordinary that becomes extraordinary. So in "Saigon" the seemingly peaceful everyday life of a young Vietnamese woman conveys the sense of horror, past or still looming. As in a dream, the sea where the threatening shadows of American helicopters once stirred becomes a flowering field; you can almost breathe its scent, in place, for a moment, of the acrid smell of napalm. The Vietnam War is the great political watershed of those years. De Gregori had already denounced it through satire with "La Ballata di Spiro Agnew" back in his Folkstudio days, but here he keeps a calmer, more reflective tone. An immature tale, yet already lyrically powerful, driven by a pulsing bass, Roberto Ciotti's blues guitar and Edoardo De Angelis's countermelody. In 1989 Paola Turci would record a splendid cover of it, which De Gregori himself would acknowledge as superior to the original.

Arlecchino (from "Francesco De Gregori", 1974)

Fiori falsi e sogni veri,

tra gli eroi della friggitoria Chantant,

grazie, ho mangiato ieri,

un sorriso questa sera basterà

De Gregori's tribute to his roots, firmly planted in the damp basement on Via Garibaldi known as Folkstudio. The mother house he would continue to address with affection and nostalgia. As in the story of this tightrope-walking artist, suspended on the wire of a life spent enchanting audiences ("Arlecchino is already on the wire, people want to see what he'll do"), where the opening line pays tribute precisely to the early Folkstudio, rechristened for the occasion "Friggitoria Chantant," where "it wasn't even important to eat, it was enough to smile at each other, it was enough to communicate." A charming autobiographical vignette: naive, unadorned and technically rough around the edges. But already containing the core of De Gregori's finest art.

Storie di ieri (from "Rimmel", 1975)

Mio padre ha una storia comune

Condivisa dalla sua generazione

La mascella al cortile parlava

Troppi morti lo hanno smentito

Tutta gente che aveva capito

Another remarkably prophetic song. Originally slated to open the "Pecora" album, it was blocked by RCA and only released a year later on "Rimmel", by which point, as De Gregori would wryly note, "anti-fascism had become more acceptable even to the mass media." That same year it also appeared on "Volume VIII" by Fabrizio De André, the album born precisely from the collaboration between the two songwriters. The lyrics unmask the fascisms of yesterday, but above all those of today, dressed in double-breasted suits: "The new leaders have serene faces/ and ties that match their shirts." In the original version, instead of "new leaders," a name was named outright: Giorgio Almirante, secretary of the Movimento Sociale. De André would opt for a middle ground: "The big boss." De Gregori instead plays on synecdoche: it isn't Mussolini speaking to the courtyard, but rather "the jaw," and the vast crowds that filled the squares are reduced to a "courtyard." A counterpoint tinged with sarcasm, recalling the blood paid for that collective delusion ("too many dead have disproved it, all people who had understood") and closing with an illuminating chess metaphor: "Playing with the black pieces, you always lose." And if it's true that "Mussolini also wrote poetry," then poets must indeed be "ugly creatures," to the point that "every time they speak it's a con." "Stories of yesterday," yet terribly current.

Viva l’Italy (Viva l’Italia, 1979)

Viva l’Italy,

l’Italy liberata.

L’Italy del valzer.

l’Italy del caffè,

l’Italy derubata e colpita al cuore.

Viva l’Italy,

l’Italy che non muore

Here, more than the opening, it's the whole lyric that matters. Because the collage of images in "Viva l'Italy" remains, nearly 40 years on, the definitive snapshot of a country that's "half garden and half prison." At the tail end of the 1970s — the decade of imagination in power, but also of terrorism and state massacres — De Gregori questions what remains of anti-fascist Italy, of its founding, unifying values, of its democratic antibodies. And he tries to tell it in the most reckless way possible. With a ballad at serious risk of being misread. And which, in fact, would almost always be misread. Or pulled by the sleeve. By the left, and even by the right. With a lyric that surveys thirty years of national history: the Resistance and liberation from Nazi-Fascism ("l'Italy liberata"), the corruption and speculation that followed the economic boom (Italy "derubata e colpita al cuore," "assassinata dai giornali e dal cemento"), the Years of Lead ("l'Italia con gli occhi asciutti nella notte scura"), the strategy of tension and the Piazza Fontana massacre of 1969 ("l'Italia del 12 dicembre"). An anaphoric, allegorical sequence built on antithesis, on duality. There's the dimension of the carefree innocence that once was (the little Italy "del valzer" and "del caffè"), that of abandonment ("l'Italia dimenticata"), of the healthy, popular soul ("l'Italia che non muore," the one that "si dispera" and "si innamora"), and the ill-fated, credulous one ("l'Italia metà dovere e metà fortuna"). It would be Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager who launched the Rolling Stones, who brought out the popular soul of that melody, having the riff played on bagpipes, the folk instrument par excellence. The result would become one of the absolute peaks of De Gregori's songbook.

A Pa' (from "Scacchi e tarocchi," 1985) 

Non mi ricordo se c'era la luna

e né che occhi aveva il ragazzo,

ma mi ricordo quel sapore in gola

and the smell of the sea, like a slap

The tragic end of Pierpaolo Pasolini, another of De Gregori's great idols, in a chilling snapshot: the first line of the song, the last of his life. The sea at Ostia, where Pasolini met his death on the night between November 1st and 2nd, 1975, and a blurred memory of the "ragazzo di vita" Pino Pelosi, who would be convicted of his murder. On the tenth anniversary of Pasolini's death, a heartfelt tribute from the same songwriter who had once reserved bile-soaked verses for the "Poeti per l'estate," those who "dream of victories and literary prizes" and "stab their dearest friends in the back." For De Gregori, Pasolini instead embodies the sincerity of a lucid, vital gaze: "Quando tra i buoni poeti ne trovi uno vero, è come partire lontano, come viaggiare davvero." Words that close "Poeti per l'estate" itself and precede the actual tribute of "A Pa'," directly inspired by Giovanna Marini's "Lamento per la morte di Pierpaolo Pasolini." Along with Pasolini's own poem "Preghiera su commissione" ("Caro Dio, facci vivere come gli uccelli del cielo e i gigli dei campi"), which resurfaces in the song's poignant final invocation.

Il panorama di Betlemme (from "Pezzi," 2001)

Un uomo ferito alla schiena

sulla sabbia si trascina

E sente la terra che chiama

sente la notte che sta per venire

E dice Signore ti prego

lasciami respirare

lasciamo un po' riposare

prima che devo morire

Written in 2001, still dramatically relevant today. De Gregori tears through the “curtain of flames” of the Middle East, the “panorama of Bethlehem,” with its daily carnage and its martyrs, like the man “stretched out on the ground” (Israeli or Palestinian, for once it doesn't matter) invoking one last breath before dying, in this poignant rock ballad steeped in blues flavors and desert atmospheres. An opening that hits like a punch in the stomach and leads into a white-hot electric guitar riff, making this one of the finest rock numbers in his songbook (alongside the other tour de force in Calexico style, "La testa nel secchio," featured on the same album).

Generale (from “De Gregori,” 1978)

Generale, dietro la collina

Ci sta la notte crucca e assassina

E in mezzo al prato c’è una contadina

Curva sul tramonto, sembra una bambina

Di cinquant’anni e di cinque figli

Venuti al mondo come conigli

Partiti al mondo come soldati

E non ancora tornati

The famous opening of one of De Gregori's few hits. The First World War, every war, seen through a private, intimate story. The tale of a soldier returning home, leaving behind him, "behind the hill," the wreckage of the conflict ("the murderous German night"), an endless battlefield of which nothing remains but "pine needles and silence and mushrooms." The train journey home leads into a rediscovered everyday life made of home, farmwomen bent over at sunset, mushrooms left to dry, and children who won't go to sleep. It's life regained. "It tells of the end of a war," De Gregori would explain, "It has the slow rhythm of a river about to reach its mouth, of water about to grow calm. It's the story of a return to normality, and at that moment the country around me, Italy, really seemed to need it. And so did I, all things considered…" It was with "Generale," in fact, that he emerged from the long, restless night that followed Palalido. And it even conquered the singles charts.

Santa Lucia (from “Bufalo Bill,” 1976)

Santa Lucia, per tutti quelli che hanno occhi

E un cuore che non basta agli occhi

And for the peace of mind of those who go to sea

And for every tear on your dress

For those who haven't understood

These are the lines that reveal a secular prayer that moves us without ever chasing after the tears: an intercession not only for the disinherited of the earth, but for all “the men who cannot see”. Because sometimes “they have eyes and a heart that isn't enough for their eyes”, or they are “easy people who never have doubts”. It's the plea of someone who fears being left alone, “at the crossing of the winds”, ending up “burned alive”, or simply worn down, day after day, by “our crown of stars and thorns”, by “our fear of darkness and of imagination”. Only the saint who protects sight can bring safely to harbour the “broken boat” of a blind humanity, left at the mercy of social injustice, pain and loneliness. In its own way, a social hymn, a hymn of brotherhood, where the invocation to the saint recalls the humble language of folk song. Set to a solemn, aching musical arrangement: Toto Torquati's piano underpinning the hushed vocal, building to a crescendo and a bluesy electric guitar coda that repeats the melody over an organ backing. Lucio Dalla would name it his favourite De Gregori song.

L'agnello di Dio (from “Prendere e lasciare”, 1996) 

Here is the Lamb of God

Who takes away the sins of the world

Said the Slavic girl

Come from the depths

Said the African girl on the ring road

Here is the Lamb of God

Who comes out to graze

And gets out of the car

To negotiate a price

De Gregori has never stopped searching for another Egypt, probing reality with a merciless eye to expose fresh abuses and hypocrisies, chasing the dream of a fairer society. Even at the risk of sounding preachy or coming across as moralistic. Emblematic in this sense is a "total" song like "L'agnello di Dio", a kind of summa of De Gregori's thinking on the atrocities of the contemporary world, viewed through a secular humanism that is nonetheless not so far removed from the Gospel perspective. Here "the Slavic girl come from the depths" and "the African girl on the ring road" are merely the latest sacrificial victims of the new executioners. L'Osservatore Romano would get it wrong, plunging headlong into a pointless controversy, because De Gregori's song in fact fully expresses the spirit of the Gospels. Cardinal Ersilio Tonini would acknowledge as much in an unexpected televised face-to-face on Red Ronnie's Roxy Bar, which ended with the two men moved to a heartfelt embrace.

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