Of Crimes and Punishments According to Fabrizio De André

"Al vostro posto non ci so stare. Dei delitti e delle pene secondo Fabrizio De André". This is the title of the essay, published on 6 June 2025 by Pacini Editore (144 pages), in which Fabrizio Bartelloni – criminal defence lawyer, honorary judge, and also a keen scholar and passionate lover of music and songwriting – offers an accurate and detailed legal analysis of the Ligurian songwriter's body of work, weaving together lyrics and biographical anecdotes.

The book is endorsed by the Museo di Viadelcampo29rosso and the Camera Penale di Pisa, and aims to raise awareness of the conditions of prisoners and of Italian prisons in general – and, more broadly, of the nature and function of criminal punishment.

We spoke with Fabrizio Bartelloni, the author of the book.

How and when did the idea of examining Fabrizio De André's body of lyrics from a legal perspective come about?

The idea of dedicating a book to Fabrizio De André had been with me for a long time, above all as a way of giving thanks and "paying off a debt" for everything I've received as a gift and an inheritance from him and his songs. Given the enormous number of books and publications already out there, I thought it might be interesting and original to combine my expertise as a legal scholar with my passion for and knowledge of De André's life and work, also because I knew very well how the themes of justice, punishment and the law ran through his entire songbook – from his early days right up to "Anime salve" – which also allowed me to dig deeper into certain chapters of his biography.

As you explain in the book, De André had studied law without completing his degree. And he had an older brother, Mauro – a renowned lawyer – after whom Ravenna's indoor sports arena is named…

Mauro, Fabrizio's brother, who also died prematurely at the age of 55, matched the ideal son that their parents – and Professor Giuseppe in particular – dreamed of having. Intelligent, serious, studious, he graduated with flying colours and went on to become a respected civil lawyer (the De André law firm still exists today, in Genoa, ed.). Among other things, he was Raoul Gardini's lawyer and friend, and it was Gardini who named Ravenna's arena after him: the Paladeandré, indeed. Fabrizio was, essentially, his opposite, and for many years he lived, often painfully, with the comparison to a model of personal success that was completely unsuited to him, with resulting conflicts with his father, with his brother, and presumably with himself as well.

Several threads emerge from your narrative. The first name is that of Georges Brassens, an undeniable influence alongside Jacques Brel (though later there would be translations of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen). Brassens, whose songs are often examples of mockery ("Il gorilla" dates from 1952, as you point out in the essay it's the same age as "Vecchio scarpone"), is a key influence when it comes to attention to legal matters too, isn't he?

The impact of Georges Brassens and his songs on the young De André is decisive from every point of view: musical, ethical, even political. In fact, it was the moustachioed Occitan who first drew Fabrizio towards anarchism and its leading theorists (Stirner, Bakunin, Malatesta and so on), and therefore also towards a view of the law and of the so-called established order that we could call antagonistic.

"Il gorilla" is a piece of mockery, but also a scathing j'accuse against the death penalty and the "casualness" with which certain judges dispense justice – Brassens dedicated it to a friend of his who actually ended up under the guillotine – a message and a stance that De André immediately felt as his own.

All the songs from his early period, when they aren't outright faithful translations of Brassens, carry with them the imprint of the French chansonnier.

Then there are his fellow songwriters. Those who studied him (Roberto Vecchioni), those who criticised him (from the left, like Giorgio Gaber, and from the right, like Bruno Lauzi, who found the rhetoric of "Il pescatore" unbearable)…

De André's relationship with his fellow songwriters would probably deserve a book of its own. He collaborated with many of them (Francesco De Gregori, Ivano Fossati, Mauro Pagani, Massimo Bubola, among others), almost always ending up quarrelling with them, only to patch things up later. With others he had disputes that were eventually settled amicably (see the case of the "Garibaldi-style" appropriation of a piece of music composed by Enzo Jannacci for "Via del Campo") or with good humour (the boycott staged by the De André-De Gregori-Nanni Ricordi trio at the Milan launch of Antonello Venditti's "Quando verrà Natale" is legendary); from others still he came under attack.

Gaber's came after the release of "Storia di un impiegato", at a time when the forced politicisation of the singer-songwriter scene spawned more monsters than the sleep of reason ever did, but the two later made peace. Lauzi, on the other hand, being the liberal and the polemicist that he was, simply couldn't stomach – and perhaps couldn't even fully grasp – Fabrizio's anarchism, even though he held him in deep esteem.

I believe it's one of the most important parts of the whole book. Certainly one of those that makes it, hopefully at least, a text different from the many others devoted to Faber. I wanted to give a lot of space to episodes in his life where De André showed there was absolute consistency between what he sang and said from the stage and how he then acted, or would have acted, in given situations. The dramatic episode of the kidnapping is the clearest example, with the forgiveness immediately granted to those who physically carried out the abduction, and his ability, as a victim, to understand the social and cultural context in which his captors had grown up and been shaped — finding in this way not a justification, but an explanation for their act.

It's a different matter when it comes to those who ordered the crime, although he and Dori Ghezzi ultimately extended their forgiveness to everyone, even waiving their right to bring a civil suit in the criminal trial and signing the request for clemency filed on behalf of Salvatore Vargiu, the gang's supplier, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

"With all due respect to Beccaria, I don't believe prison is an institution of rehabilitation. Jail is just a terrible punishment, a form of revenge. And taking revenge, to me, is for fools." In other passages you also recount the time he lived in a studio flat with the poet Riccardo Mannerini, who sheltered fugitives in his home who would otherwise have ended up in jail. How would you define Fabrizio's approach, beyond easy labels? An anarchist? A libertarian?

De André's anarchism was an ethical anarchism more than a strictly political one. He had been struck by Malatesta's phrase defining anarchists as "godless saints who help those more desperate than themselves," and he largely made it his creed. He was certainly a libertarian, but above all, in keeping with a certain strand of anarchist thought (and not only that), he believed that the instinct for understanding and welcoming others, natural to human beings, was inevitably corrupted once they were absorbed into an organized social context — for the simple reason that laws, in any given territorial and historical context, are always made by whichever social class happens to dominate at that moment. And they are made, inevitably, for that class's own benefit and protection. For De André, prison was one of the many emanations and manifestations of bourgeois power, and one of the consequences of the "contamination" I described, which had elevated social revenge to the rank of, if not quite a value, then a duty. It should be said that, later in life, well beyond the era of that quote, he came to understand the rehabilitative potential of penal institutions, and even worked personally to try to bring it about.

In "La domenica delle salme" (from "Le nuvole"), Fabrizio takes a stand on Renato Curcio, convicted of moral complicity in voluntary homicide, denouncing how much injustice still existed in Italy. "He, who committed no crime, is still in jail because he refused to dissociate himself — that is, he didn't take advantage of that rule, an immoral one at that, which allows people to gain legal benefits. In short, Curcio, who is no informer, stays inside, while I see some of my own kidnappers moving freely around Gallura"…

In the end Curcio too was released. And I've always wondered whether De André's cry of outrage, along with those of other singer-songwriters, might have had some effect. It would be comforting to think so. In any case, yes: for De André, the Italian law that even today, and increasingly so, rewards so-called terrorists who "dissociate" (just as it rewards mafia informants, the so-called pentiti) — and more generally anyone who cooperates with the justice system by enabling the arrest of others — was immoral and unacceptable. On a personal level, he identified far more with the ethical code of those who had physically carried out his kidnapping, sons of the deepest Barbagia, who had not behaved as "informers" and had thus brought home extremely harsh, "exemplary" sentences, than with that of the masterminds, who, by cooperating and getting the whole gang arrested, secured themselves significant reductions in sentence. In the same way, the unrepentant Curcio kept serving his time in Italy's prisons, while his utilitarian-ly redeemed comrades regained their freedom one after another.

Towards the end of the 1960s, Fabrizio De André, because of "Carlo Martello", was reported for obscene content by a listener from Veneto (the trial ultimately ended in acquittal for lack of grounds). One song you consider exemplary in illustrating his focus on the theme of justice is "La ballata del Michè"…

"Carlo Martello…" was written in 1963, as a boutade put together with his great friend from his youth, Paolo Villaggio, and built on the conviction that this King, who had never really been much of a King, was in truth "a great womanizer." A provocation some considered excessive in a still puritanical Italy.

"La ballata del Michè", which Fabrizio considered his first true song, instead starts from the drama of a real event: the murder, by a sub-proletarian man who had emigrated to Genoa from southern Italy, one Michele Aiello, of his rival in love — or rather, of the man trying to steal from him the one thing he possessed: the love of his life. The news story thus gave him the chance to express the convictions that would stay with him his whole life: bourgeois law that comes down hard on anyone outside the ruling class; prison as a place of "already dead souls" and a negation of life itself, and thus a path toward suicide; the absence of any human pietas even in those who ought to be its foremost bearers, because wherever there is power there can be no goodness (until the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church denied religious funerals and burial in consecrated ground to those who had taken their own lives).

Speaking of "a stubborn, contrary course", right in the middle of '68, Fabrizio De André was misunderstood when he released "La buona novella", which many called anachronistic. In your view, what are the best examples that illustrate the secular religiosity attributed to De André's lyrics?

That whole album, inspired by the apocryphal gospels, tells the story of De André's secular religiosity, in which he recognizes Jesus of Nazareth not as a God but as a man — for him, the first anarchist and revolutionary in history — the bearer of a message so extraordinary that it caused him to be mistaken for a supernatural being. The same transfiguration occurs in "Il pescatore", whose protagonist is once again a clear humanization of Christ, who, as he says in "Laudate hominem", cannot be thought of as the son of God, but as the son of man, and thus a brother to him too. In any case, Fabrizio felt spiritually close to the animism of Native Americans.

At the end of your book there's a playlist. If you had to choose five songs that, more than any others, explain Faber's approach to the theme of justice, which would you pick and why?

"La ballata del Michè", because it's the first, and for the reasons I've already mentioned. "La città vecchia" because its final verse, which highlights the gap between those who judge others "like a good bourgeois" and those who can recognize them as their fellow human beings, "victims of this world," is the summa of his thinking on justice. "Il testamento di Tito" because, as he himself said, it's the song in which, by giving voice to someone outside the ruling class, all the contradictions and inconsistencies of laws made by those in power, in their own image and likeness, are laid bare. "Un giudice" because it tackles another flaw in the concept of justice — namely the ontological impossibility for us weak, vulnerable and ever-changing human beings to dispense justice with fairness and detachment, that is, by abstracting ourselves from the feelings, torments and resentments running through us. "Don Raffaè" because it's a masterpiece that, in the space of five minutes, not only depicts everyday prison life but also offers a merciless snapshot of Italy's socio-political reality. One not too different today from that of 1990. If anything, perhaps even worse.

Besides being a legal scholar, Fabrizio, you're also a passionate devotee of music and singer-songwriter art. For years now, in Pisa, you and Marco Masoni have organized public talks exploring artists like Battisti, De André, De Gregori and Paolo Conte. Based on this experience of yours, do you think spreading musical culture through these listening sessions, as shared listening experiences, is important?

Without false modesty, I can tell you that Marco and I were genuine trailblazers when it comes to events dedicated to singer-songwriters. Back in 2019, when we started out, initiatives like this basically didn't exist, or were extremely sporadic. Now there are hundreds of them everywhere – in our area, more than a few people have “drawn inspiration” from us, incidentally – and in many different forms. Is it just a case of fashion being fashion, as Gaber and Luporini once sang? Maybe. But it's also a reassuring sign that this heritage – not just musical, but cultural – embodied in the work of these extraordinary artists won't be lost in the wind, like Dylan's famous "answer".

What are your upcoming events?

Starting in February, we'll be returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak – the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica at the University of Pisa, where it all began – for a new series of monthly gatherings. This time, though, we'll be focusing on single LPs, records by singer-songwriters celebrating significant anniversaries in 2026, artists so important to Italian music that they deserve an evening all to themselves. We'll kick off with “His Master's Voice” by Franco Battiato, before moving on to the thirtieth anniversary of De André's “Anime salve”, the fortieth of Lucio Battisti's “Don Giovanni”, and the fiftieth of “Via Paolo Fabbri, 43” by the great Guccini.

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