His free song

Lucio Battisti had to fight his whole life against prejudices and false myths surrounding him. One of the best known concerns his alleged political allegiance. The singer-songwriter from Poggio Bustone, in fact, was long pigeonholed - especially in the Italian debate of the 1970s - as a "right-wing" artist. A completely arbitrary label, built on forced suggestions that seem laughable today. The lyrics of his songs from the 1970s, written by Mogol, avoided the language of explicit political engagement, favoring instead a sentimental, private dimension, often focused on romantic experience. In a context where the singer-songwriter tradition was also read as an ideological tool, this choice was interpreted by part of the critical establishment as a lack of engagement, if not an implicit alignment with a conservative outlook.

The suspicion was reinforced by a few lines, taken out of context and stretched beyond their meaning. In "La collina dei ciliegi" there's the line "planando sopra boschi di braccia tese" ("gliding over forests of raised arms"), a lyrical image that some grotesquely chose to read as an allusion to fascist iconography. In "La canzone del sole", the line "mare nero, mare nero" ("black sea, black sea") was arbitrarily linked to political symbolism, ignoring the context of the romantic narrative ("tu eri chiara e trasparente come me", "you were clear and transparent like me"). Added to these readings were rumors that were never proven, such as alleged funding to the MSI, and even a photograph interpreted as a fascist salute, when it was actually a gesture directed at the audience during a concert. The result was an ideological construct with no real foundation, fueled by a bleak and polarized climate.

Paradoxically, however, the regime that ended up censoring Battisti was a right-wing one: Francisco Franco's Spain. In the 1970s, while the Lazio-born singer-songwriter was widely popular on the Iberian peninsula - broadcast on radio and television both in Italian and in translated versions - his records were subjected to systematic scrutiny by the bodies of the Ministry of Information and Tourism. The revelation is contained in a book by Spanish music critic Xavier Valiño, "Veleno in dosi camuffate: la censura nei dischi pop durante il franchismo" ("Poison in Disguised Doses: Censorship of Pop Records under Francoism"), published by Milenio. It seems that Franco's censorship, active until 1977, focused on three main areas: sexuality, religion and public morality. And the measures taken against Battisti concerned at least four releases.

On the album "Anima Latina" (1974), the track "Anonimo" was cut, deemed too explicit on an erotic level. The offending lines read:

Nascosti giù al fosso

complice il sesso

a misurarsi,

a masturbarsi un po'…

Sudore che diventa alloro. Amore mio…

Fermarsi poi ad un tratto

lottar col reggiseno

In "Amore e non amore" (1971), censorship struck both the artwork and the content. The original cover, showing Battisti in the foreground with his girlfriend's backside behind him, was altered for the Spanish edition, removing the image as indecent. The album's track titles were also tampered with: "Una poltrona, un bicchiere di cognac, un televisore. 35 morti ai confini tra Israele e Giordania" was cut down to just "Una poltrona", stripping out the geopolitical reference. The track "Supermarket" was banned outright over supposedly suggestive innuendo:

Comprerò le banane, le banane comprerò…

Anche tu ami tanto le banane

Further interference targeted "Il nostro caro angelo" (1973). The original cover, featuring a naked child and two female figures (one in a bikini, the other topless), was completely reworked: the child vanished, one of the women was removed altogether, and the other was redrawn fully clothed. The track "Le allettanti promesse" was also censored for content deemed offensive to morality and religion:

Perché tu non vieni insieme a noi…

La domenica la messa finalmente sentirai…

Yeah, but this isn't a life…

and if you talk to a girl who's already been in a relationship

loro ti mettono due timbri: ruffiano e prostituta

Last but not least, the Spanish censor's finest touch: on the 7-inch single "La collina dei ciliegi" / "Il nostro caro Angelo", the cover was reduced to a neutral image of two cherries, wiping out any hint of visual ambiguity.

The songs of Mogol and Battisti, after all, dwelt on a fairly explicit sensual imagery: desire, attraction, erotic tension. This near-exclusive focus on love as a theme drew criticism from several fronts amid the climate of the 1970s. Part of the left, especially the extra-parliamentary left, read it as a form of disengagement, if not outright detachment from social conflict. Certain feminist circles interpreted those songs as reductive or lopsided, accusing them of fixating on a simplistic view of relationships between men and women.

In short, if in 1970s Italy Lucio Battisti was seen as none too "politically correct" by the dominant left-wing culture, it was under a right-wing dictatorship, in Spain, that his work proved hardest to swallow, suffering heavy-handed censorship. His lyrics, focused as they were on intimacy, desire and the contradictions of human relationships, proved incompatible with religious orthodoxy and the social control of Francoism.

Battisti, the eternal "non-aligned" artist, never signed up to any ideological programme nor sought political legitimacy. It was precisely this independence that made him a target of opposing misreadings. A free artist, judged by categories that were never truly his.

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08/05/2026