Lucio Dalla-Roberto Roversi

“If I hadn’t met Roversi, I’d be a plumber by now,” Lucio Dalla would exaggerate, out of sheer gratitude, in an interview given two years before his death. And yet the relationship between the two fiery Bolognese – the singer-songwriter and the poet/bookseller – wasn't always idyllic; in fact, it soon turned stormy, as revealed by the venomous exchange of letters that Sony brought to light in the 2013 box set, reconstructing the story of one of the most important unions between song and literature in Italian music. A difficult relationship between two very different people, though strongly drawn to one another: the popular Dalla, with his instinctive, street-smart approach; the fiercely intellectual Roversi, with his elegant, caustic verse, isolated in an ivory tower of incommunicability. Yet it was precisely the fusion of these two worlds that produced three works capable of revolutionizing Italian song – dismantling the traditional verse-chorus formula and replacing it with a peculiar flow of music and poetry, undoubtedly experimental but never pretentious or self-indulgent; on the contrary, often quite pleasing, thanks to Dalla's melodic gift and to arrangements that were both carefully calibrated and imaginative. And this is also why “the Dalla-Roversi records are, after all, still works meant for the masses through and through, but for an intelligent mass endowed with critical sense,” as Fabio Zuffanti argues in Rolling Stone, even suggesting that this might be the absolute peak of the Bolognese singer-songwriter's catalogue (though here it's hard to follow him, given the three masterpieces that came after).

Fifty years on from the first chapter of that historic partnership, we try to piece together – through verses, sounds and testimonies – a unique, utterly unrepeatable experiment that managed to capture the Italy of its time while remaining eerily topical and prophetic. Even half a century later.

Il giorno aveva cinque teste (1973)

I don't remember which song set it in motion. It was a key that set everything in motion, which is why I decided to work with Roversi, and I decided it in earnest. It was the line 'nevica sulla mia mano'

(Lucio Dalla)

On 20 January 1973, an alien LP landed on record shop shelves, starting with that surreal cover, entrusted to the Up & Down Studio, which had already worked on De André's first 45, “Nuvole barocche”. A naif drawing depicting a desolate land and a city in which some of the world's major monuments can be made out; around it, two processions, men on the right and women on the left, in costumes – both contemporary and historical – leading up to two nude figures in the foreground, a latter-day Adam and Eve, representing a utopian future in which humanity has returned to a state of innocence and purity. Almost a Renaissance allegory, probably inspired by Titian's “Sacred and Profane Love”, albeit in a simpler, more schematic style. On the right, that same descriptive caption that would recur in the second chapter of the trilogy: “Ten songs by Lucio Dalla, lyrics by Roberto Roversi” (the third chapter is a story apart, as we'll explain later).

So how did this Bolognese workshop get going, born out of the unlikely rapport between two such seemingly irreconcilable figures?

In 1972, thirty-year-old Lucio Dalla – “Italy's first soulman”, discovered by Gino Paoli in the jazz combos and who had already tasted triumph at Sanremo with “4/3/1943” and “Piazza Grande” – was going through a deep creative crisis. He had already broken up with Paola Pallottino, his friend and later a noted art historian, who had written the lyrics to “4/3/1943”. And he was also unhappy with “Piazza Grande”, penned by the duo Bardotti-Baldazzi, which he (rather ungenerously) dismissed as “a blatant attempt to repeat the Gesù Bambino trick, a cheap operation”. Those lines, memorable as they were, had by now become too tight a fit for him. And success wasn't the goal he was after. If anything, he was scared to death of being lumped in with home-grown “little pop songs”.

After all, ever since “Lucio dove vai” (1967) he had lived with a kind of split between his true self and his public image. He was thus in pursuit of a “third way” for Italian song: a middle ground between the ideological singer-songwriter tradition of Pietrangeli, Guccini and Lolli and pop music. In short, a style entirely his own, original, able to portray characters and individual emotions while also tearing open a window onto society, holding up to ridicule the arrogance and contradictions of power.

It's producer Renzo Cremonini, former assistant director to Michelangelo Antonioni, who suggests to him the name of fellow Bolognese Roberto Roversi, writer and bookseller, screenwriter and playwright. A left-wing intellectual (in the noblest sense of the term), who in 1955 founded the magazine Officina together with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francesco Leonetti, and who by now sympathizes with Lotta Continua. Lucio shows up at the Libreria Palmaverde on Via Castiglione in Bologna to ask him for lyrics for his songs. He becomes particularly enamoured of one line, “nevica sulla mia mano” (from “La canzone di Orlando”), which, in his own account, will be the spark for their entire collaboration (it's no coincidence that it will later be chosen as the title of the splendid 2013 box set devoted to the trilogy, which includes 4 discs and a 200-page illustrated book with photos and manuscripts, in which the two protagonists recount their extraordinary meeting).

Roversi is the right man at the right time: he's the sophisticated, conceptual author capable of sealing the artistic metamorphosis that Dalla was hoping for. An undertaking aimed, in his own words, at giving the song form a “civic” character: no longer bound solely to the tired heart-and-love formula.

As soon as the recording of the album is finished, Lucio shuts himself away at home and, at 4 in the morning, writes a letter to his friend brimming with enthusiasm and gratitude: “You taught me everything: to have respect and fear at the same time, and love for my work – we can now know its content – love because I wouldn't sell this record even for my mother's life (maybe that's overstating it), because I will protect it even at the cost of my own life, because I feel I can sing it and play it in front of kings (if there still are any) and in front of beggars, mayors, madmen and saints. (…) I have made, played, thought and sung more music in these fifteen days than in my entire life. You should have been there. I checked every note, every chord, every inflection of the voice against myself, but above all bearing in mind what you would have wanted, preferred or chosen and sung. The funny thing is I had the feeling that you too would have sung it wonderfully. (…) I couldn't wait for morning to come so I could start working and singing, translating you and translating your ideas into sounds, feelings, shouts and even the rhythmic beats of a heart.”

But Roversi's work, too, was maniacally meticulous: for song lyrics he used the very same method he was used to for his poetry, namely a continual rewriting of his own words, as can be seen from the various manuscripts included in the aforementioned box set. And once finished, the lyrics were absolutely untouchable. “Sometimes I was forced to go back to Rome because, when sung, you couldn't make out the question mark that closed a line. I explained to him that it was very difficult: you can't sing 'ma mi vuoi beeeneee' and make people hear that it's a question, how do you do that? But Roversi was my guide, my education, my guru (even though he dislikes that word)”, Dalla will later recall. With his theatrical bent and his interpretive versatility, after all, the singer of “4 marzo 1943” was the perfect vehicle for turning those lines into a “total song”, as Giovanna Marini will define it, stressing that Dalla “is never chasing gratuitous virtuosity or needless quirks. His music is melodic and consonant as far as the instrumental architecture goes, dissonant and irreverent in its use of the voice”.

Ten songs, then. All written together with Roversi, with the exception of the instrumental (and brilliant) “Pezzo zero”, a disorienting jumble of phonemes in which the words, thus broken apart, lose all meaning according to the traditional codes of language, yet gain an instinctive musicality, almost as if to symbolize a return to a primitivism that could free humanity from convention.

The words of the opening “Un'auto targata TO”, on the other hand, carry a precise, sharp meaning: in a burst of optimism, the two collaborators even submitted it to Sanremo, only to be inevitably rejected. Dalla himself would later call it “the song most unbalanced in terms of the relationship between language and ideology”. It's a scathing indictment of “an Italy gutted by the bulldozers that devoured it”. Strings and church bells conceal a bitter slice of immigration (from Scilla to Turin) and property speculation, in the illusory eldorado of the North:

This place in the sky is called Turin

Long, grand avenues, splendid mountains of snow

On the green glass of the Valentino

All the banks of the Po lit up

Bricks upon bricks

The southerners are condemned

To build for others

Fifty-million-lira apartments

Dalla and Roversi depict a humanity alienated within the automated mechanisms of industry (“L'operaio Gerolamo”) or within the repetitive rituals of everyday life (“Alla fermata del tram”). The protagonist of the former – written, according to Dalla's own account, “with the whole of the South breathing down my neck” – is a symbol of all workers, of everyone forced into obsessive, dehumanizing labour, of every immigrant who arrived in Turin with a cardboard suitcase in tow. Gerolamo is a mere number, trapped within the pitiless gears of the assembly line and destined to be buried and replaced in a cycle of production that can never end, metaphorically represented by the continuous, spectral howls of the Moog:

S’alza il sole sui monti

E sono ferito a morte, ferito al petto e condannato

Povero operaio, povero pastore, povero contadino

S’alza il sole sui monti

E un altro al posto mio è già arrivato

But it isn't only the relentless rhythm of labor that crushes a person. Even in a seemingly quiet routine, the shadow of oppression can lurk. "A una fermata del tram" is an extraordinary parable about dictatorships - like the one that oppressed East Berlin at the time, where dissidents, fearing they were being spied on, would talk to each other at tram stops so the clatter of the rails would cover their voices and keep their conversations from being recorded. It's a desperate, hallucinated dialogue set against a wintry backdrop, one that exposes the illusion of a "normal" life in which the seasons pass by with work, love, the usual things, until one morning the trams stop running and an iron hand taps us on the shoulder (“Sembra che tutto proceda a dovere/ Che dietro a ogni autunno vada in orario l’inverno… Ma è solo perché camminano i tram… Quando è probabile ad ogni momento/ Una tempesta di vento/ O che una mano di ferro ci tocchi la spalla”).

Sometimes it takes just a small detail to open up unforeseen horizons. Like the two lovers caught on a sweltering August day in "Il grippaggio," a brief suite in five movements that tells how it only takes being stranded by a car that's "seized up" and having to abandon the calm, straight lines of the highway, to be forced to reckon with the desolation all around - with the crowd of "zombies" left on the margins of Western society: a dispossessed, underground humanity seeking shelter in crumbling shacks:

La macchina è ingrippata

Io e te camminiamo

tenendoci per mano

a cercare un meccanico

là verso il paese nascosto

da un grande verde di bosco

Sciabola fitta l’aria d’agosto

su questa strada abbandonata

 

Ma non è abbandonata

On the embankment in a row

ten thousand shacks

and caves of fugitives

Girls' eyes and the hands

of living men

emerge from the earth, with skulls,

rifles. A hard day

Amid violent rhythmic breaks and unpredictable shifts between acoustic and electric, themes emerge that would go on to become central to Dalla's songbook, such as the open tension of feeling, almost an adventurous wind scorching memory in that "Canzone di Orlando", which besides the fateful line from which it all sprang ("nevica sulla mia mano"), contains references to the wondrous medieval deeds of Ariosto's knight but above all to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, who dies uttering the words "È l'oca! È l'oca selvatica!", which would point back to the Anser Anser in Roversi's lyrics.

Nevica sulla mia mano

e il mio cavallo è ormai lontano

notte e nebbia negli occhi

il ferro sui tuoi ginocchi

arco e frecce non scocchi

Anser Anser che va

Equally recurrent in Dalla's work is the comparison between past and present. In this case, with the toll of innocent blood it carries, described in the mutant rockabilly of "Passato e presente":

The past of so many years ago

at the end of forty-nine

is the massacre of the Fragalà estate

on the lands of Baron Breviglieri

Three farmhands cut down

by musket fire

in defense of property (…)

 

The present is a plow that

digs quickly into the heart (…)

 

The present is cramped rooms, the present is endless motorways

The present is a 50-kilometer bloodstain

The present is a river of sun with young lives

History takes center stage here, with a clear reference to the Melissa massacre of 1949, in which three farmhands were killed during the occupation of some uncultivated land in the Fragalà district. But there is also a fierce portrait of the transition from a peasant world to an urban, working-class one, described in the second part of the lyric, set in the present, in which the son of former farmhands finds himself in a factory, waiting for the siren to mark the end of the working day. Just like the lyrics, the music is also split in two: the theme of the past is built on rhythm'n'blues (a genre close to Dalla and his experience with Chet Baker), while the present is introduced by a progressive prologue that turns into swing until the final verse, when just two piano chords accompany the desolate description of the world today, right up to the harrowing close: a succession of moans and cries symbolizing, once again, a sense of imprisonment and oppression.

Dalla doesn't merely set Roversi's lyrics to music: he turns them into a tool of communication, an autonomous creative substance in their own right. He even takes on the role of a radio announcer, interrupting the broadcast on Christmas night to announce the discovery of a corpse. "È lì" is a kind of alienating spoken word piece avant la lettre, sketching out a noir fairy tale in ironic tones ("Erano vent'anni che in questo nostro bel mondo, nostro, non moriva un uomo, e non veniva trovato"), until the poignant musical accompaniment introduced in the second verse marks an abrupt leap from the interview with the witness into the song itself, revealing, amid gentle piano chimes, the marvel of that corpse "coperto di rami, coperto di sassi, coperto di terra", whose hand "viveva", "splendeva" and "cantava", clutching "un calcio infangato". Almost as if he were the Piero buried among red poppies in De André.

But even in such a dark and apocalyptic context, glimmers of light and hope filter through. At least in the dreamlike, fairy-tale digressions of "Il Coyote" and "La Bambina". The first celebrates the triumph of imagination over reason and common morality ("se la stella con la coda tante storie raccontava, la fantasia del coyote col suo fuoco la bruciava"); the second, marked by a sax solo from Lucio, embraces a return to innocence and a naturalistic yearning as the only antidote to the dehumanizing rhythms of industrial society (“La bambina la puoi incontrare/ Alle 12 e mezzo in mezzo alla strada/ Quando l’afa ti fa star male/ E la caligine fa l’aria opaca”).

Furrowed by brilliant lyrical flashes and bursts of symphonic prog, amid synth interjections and disorienting shifts in tempo and rhythm, "Il giorno aveva cinque teste" now feels a bit immature compared to the two chapters that followed. But it's the dress rehearsal that lays the groundwork for this incredibly ambitious three-act work, one destined to turn Italian song on its head by recounting the alienation of a post-agrarian country, industrialized but already in deep crisis.

Anidride solforosa (1975)

I realized his exceptional ability to sing even, as we used to say among ourselves, the phone book: in fact he sang the stock market quotations from the Milan Stock Exchange, which I had only slightly tampered with

(Roberto Roversi)

Despite its hermetic, experimental character, "Il giorno aveva cinque teste" achieves solid success with audiences, at least in the many concerts held across Italy. Then, however, everything seems to fall apart.

Dalla recalls: "I fell ill (with a serious duodenal ulcer, ed.), I was on the verge of dying. They had given up on me. Getting past the illness was hard. Having come face to face with death, I felt the need to be reborn and to heal in many senses. So I questioned everything. Feeling exploited by Rca, but above all eager for a change of scene, I decided to start everything over again from scratch. Roversi and I had a very violent clash in his bookshop. I also had a serious falling-out with Cremonini. We basically had a fight. I felt abandoned, betrayed."

But while he was starting work on a new album, the Bolognese singer-songwriter made a dramatic discovery: "I couldn't sing anyone else's lyrics." So Lucio came to terms with Roversi again: "He gave me one of his texts, and from there the whole operation started up again."

Roversi, however, didn't even own a cassette player. So Dalla took him along in his car, driving around the hills of Bologna to listen to his work on the car radio. And a bit like Nuvolari and the lizard, the rapport between the two was miraculously reborn. "I realized that even with a single song you can stab the world in the side," Dalla reveals. "I don't feel like fooling people with easy little tunes with nothing inside them. The singer who spins pointlessly on a turntable and nothing more is an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear. But I can even set the phone book to music, if Roversi writes it." And Roversi would take him at his word, having him sing the stock quotations from the Milan Stock Exchange.

The second album credited to Dalla-Roversi was meant to be titled "L'anno è un fuoco." And it's the Bolognese poet himself who explains why in the typescript that presents the work: "It stands for the obsession of this age, its various deceptions, perhaps a residual tenderness that must be sought out; but above all its unstoppable violence. So it is precisely the manner and the sound of violence – the violence that is seen and counted but not touched, and the hidden violence that cuts – that is the theme uniting, binding, holding these songs together. [...] The violence of the world is not only war, the scream of cities, the knife ready in hand, the silhouette of the shadow; it is our own violence, our youth, our loneliness, our uncertainty, our habit of suspicion, our merchant's heart or that of small, bewildered (desperate) gamblers."

Violence, then, perceived and implicit, as the common denominator of a new set of ten songs to be fully embraced with conviction, because – as Roversi writes again – "the grey quality of the times, which is the rust of iron, forces us to be utterly sincere in every respect, including when we sing; and to look, and to look deep into each other's eyes."

Then, however, they decided on a change of title, opting for that of a track that inexorably plunges back into the most alienating dimension of industrial society. A noxious substitute for the air we breathe, Anidride Solforosa symbolizes the individual's fogged-up mind, the toxic cloud that lets cities be seen "barely at all," in a hazy world, ever more polluted and mechanized, in which "we'll know how many times to make love and how many times the rivers overflow in Italy." From the splendid, almost operatic opening title track onward – the story of a girl who leaves the provinces only to find herself amid the smog of a big city – the duo, despite their quarrels, appear even more in sync: Roversi's writing settles better into the song format, and Dalla sings with overflowing verve, going so far as to mimic an eccentric Emilian woman over a metallic backdrop of proto-computer sounds, before melting into the aching melody of the chorus:

Ieri la città si vedeva a malapena

Oggi la città si vede tutta intera

Ieri il mare si scuoteva da fare pena

Oggi il mare ha la barba tutta nera

Computers have as their fate

To help mankind conquer death

In fact if the wind of pollution

Tends to rise, it helps them die

And they also help the administration

Forest heritage under destruction

The shifts between the operatic tones dictated by the piano and the more futuristic ones suggested by the keyboards reflect the contradiction of the track. Overall, though, the musical side of the operation grows more substantial, amid alienating choruses, strangled vocalizing, frenzied strings, sudden changes of rhythm and para-jazz orchestrations, which follow one another in a relentless narrative, without pauses, like a sort of hypothetical musical about the industrial age. And always in the crosshairs are the economic overreach of industrial giants and all the abuses that compromise mankind's natural authenticity and its inclination to relate to others.

But there's no room for hollow ideological rhetoric: the language is always ironic, irreverent, to the point of turning into nonsense in the rambling stock-ticker rant of "La borsa valori," delivered through Lucio's irresistible scat and inspired by a similar composition by the anarchist Franco Nebbia, "Borsa cha cha cha" (complete with a funk backing track and string-orchestra quotes from Burt Bacharach's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" and "Singin' in the Rain"):

I'm selling Bastogi

buying Comit or Ras

I'm selling Richard Ginori

buying Buton and Sip

Coge do via in un amen

buying Sifa and Fisac

dumping Snia Viscosa

I'll take Smeriglio and CIR

 

Whether Liquigas or Enel

Dalmine Falck IFIL

this morning they're not growing…

Doctor Knapp's capsule

The hermeticism of the first chapter resurfaces amid the verses of the majestic "Ulisse coperto di sale" (the track that forced Dalla to go back to Rome and remix it, after Roversi pointed out a trivial inaccuracy in the ending). The evocation of the Odyssey's warrior myth becomes a springboard for reflecting on the theme of eternal return, in which, however, "everything has vanished, everything has changed":

Una mano di calce bianca

Sulle pareti della mia stanza

Cielo giallo di garbino

Occhio caldo di bambino

Tiro il sole fin dentro la stanza

Carro di fuoco che corre sul cuore

Perché ogni giorno è sabbia e furore

E sempre uguali non sono le ore

A lyric that – punctuated by solemn orchestral arrangements and abrupt shifts in rhythm – leaves behind a sense of desolation and bitterness, much like "Un mazzo di fiori," the song about the tragic real-life story of Emilia Villesi, who, lost amid "la miseria e la fame più nera," decided to end it all by throwing herself into the Po river, leaving her bicycle on the ground and clutching flowers in her fist. Another small, everyday story told with respect and emotion, over a spare musical backdrop finely embroidered by the horns.

Two tracks are instead devoted to the issue of juvenile delinquency: “Mela di scarto” and “Carmen Colon”. On one hand, there's the drama of juvenile detention centres, which, far from fostering redemption, only add to a young criminal's rap sheet: the song is set in the Ferrante Aporti institute in Turin (“Cantina senza vino, Siberia del destino”), where he must pay the “furto di gomme e di motociclette/ perché tutti hanno fretta di scappare/ da questo posto che non cambia mai/ e di fuggire/ da questa tampa che ci fa morire”. It's a track that ranges from jazz-rock to folk, with Dalla's alienating delivery backed by the female choir of Baba Yaga.

On the other hand, there's the terrible real-life case from Churchville in 1971, involving a 10-year-old girl who fell victim to the so-called “Alphabet Killer”, as the American media dubbed the serial killer who chose victims whose surname began with the same initial as their first name. The smooth, country-tinged musicality of the arrangement and Dalla's intense vibrato accompany the harrowing description of the girl's final moments, with the hammering anaphora “Carmen Colon” repeated obsessively, conveying the full weight of the pain caused by such an early and violent death. Roversi imagines the little gypsy girl discarded like rubbish on the roadside (her body was found in a canal near Interstate 490), ignored by the cars speeding past toward the sea, only for the media to later exploit her death to stir up a wave of collective grief:

Oh Carmen Colon

questa ragazzina e la morte

commuovono la tivù.

Grandi i titoli sopra i giornali

 

Carmen Colon

è la vittima ventesima

fra i bidoni viola dell'agosto

her body hidden beneath a sheet

 

Carmen Colon

no one stopped for her

nor did they lend a hand or help

filavano via verso il mare

Roversi, who often drew inspiration for his poems from real news stories, was even summoned to Rome by Interpol for questioning about the case, since certain details in the lyrics' descriptions were said to have been withheld from the public by investigators. But the poet cleared up the mystery by showing the officers the newspaper clippings he had used as the basis for the lyrics.

The album is crowded with childhood memories, from friends who have become almost unrecognisable (“Non era più lui”) to unresolved longing, as in the poignant “Tu parlavi una lingua meravigliosa”, lighter and more metrically composed than the other tracks, with long verses that give Dalla room to play more freely with the melody, ultimately shaping a delicate ballad (“Vorrei chiamarla, dirle, le volpi con le code incendiate/ Non parlano, ma gridano pazze fra gli alberi per il dolore/ Sediamoci per terra oppure là, sopra panchine imbiancate/ Sediamoci sopra un letto di foglie secche e ascoltiamo il nostro cuore”).

And while “Merlino e l’ombra” still plays with the pastel hues of fairy tale for another intimate, secluded story, the puzzle of the closing track “Le parole incrociate” turns the crossword game into a headlong gallop backwards through history, set ablaze by an accordion, a pounding rhythm and Dalla's frenzied delivery. In the manuscript of the first draft, Roversi inserts the horizontal and vertical clue numbers as in a crossword before each verse. This element is lost in the final version released on the album, but the sense of the wordplay remains – words that intersect, Roversi's own and those of Italian history, marked by blood, massacres and death, from the Bava Beccaris massacre to the state-sanctioned slaughters of the 1970s:

Chi era Bava il beccaio? Bombardava Milano

Correva il ’98, oggi è un anno lontano

I cavalli alla Scala, gli alpini in piazza Dom

Attenzione, cavalleria piemontese, gli alpini di Val di Non

Chi era Humbert le Roi? Comandava da Roma

Folgore della guerra, con al vento la chioma

La fanteria stava a Mantova, i bersaglieri sul Po

Attenzione, fanteria calabrese, i bersaglieri di Rho (…)

 

Six columns in a row, the game is over

Nel bel prato d’Italy c’è odore di bruciato

Un filo rosso lega tutte, tutte queste vicende

Watch out, we're all in it, it's power that offends

A song that passed almost under the radar compared to others in the trilogy, yet one in which the purely revolutionary vocation driving the whole project quietly took root. A song perhaps too ambitious in its anarchic flight through the centuries of Italian history, held together by the “red thread” of oppression by power, whether monarchic or the present-day kind disguised as democracy.

Despite Lucio's initial doubts about the project (“These were lyrics that already existed, and it's an operation I never fully loved, even though there are some very beautiful things in it”), “Anidride solforosa” overcomes every difficulty in its gestation, establishing itself as an even more mature and advanced milestone in the Dalla-Roversi partnership. All this while awaiting an epilogue that would prove both exhilarating and painful, to the point of causing an irreversible rupture in their collaboration.

Automobili (1976)

A racing car with its hood adorned with great pipes

like serpents with explosive breath…

a roaring automobile, which seems to run on machine-gun fire,

is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace

(Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, in "Le Figaro", 20 February 1909)

This time the quarrel between the two protagonists plays out to the bitter end, and irreparably so. It's all down to a banal matter of censorship, which comes between the theatrical show "Il futuro dell'automobile" (also broadcast by Rai in six episodes) and its subsequent transposition into a record, "Automobili", stripped both of part of its title and of the five most political songs ("I muri del '21", "Statale adriatica Km 220", "La signora di Bologna", "Rodeo" and "Assemblaggio"), as well as two verses included in the track "Interview all'Avvocato".

Dalla fights tooth and nail to save the integrity of the project, but faced with Rca's intransigence he's forced to capitulate. Roversi doesn't forgive him. He refuses to have his name appear on the record, hiding disdainfully behind the pseudonym Norisso (an 18th-century Veronese count, a member of the Accademia dell'Arcadia in Rome). He feels betrayed by his comrade-in-arms, with whom he also carries on a venomous correspondence, recently unearthed from the drawers of the Roversi Archives: "My lyrics were mostly as welcome to the singer as castor oil," the poet vents, "He never learned them by heart. He always mangled them a little, with the petty spite of indifference (…) Everything came out approximate and garbled. Without love. (…) All the songs he wrote he then sang as a painful duty. Without joy, without genuine pleasure, without sharing in their truth." Roversi would later accuse Dalla of having sold out for the benefit of an audience "indifferent to what it's listening to" and that fills stadiums for every possible reason "except to think or to question the existing order".

Dalla is embittered. He replies by sending him a photograph of one of his concerts with the following message written on the back: "My desire to see you is equal to the anger that grips me every time I read you as a commentator, essayist, performer, translator, poet. I wish you would attend the concerts you talk and write about. I wish that, just once, your fear of seeing were defeated by your desire to be there."

It's the emergence of the natural clash between the rigour of the Marxist intellectual, shut away in his ivory tower, and the popular vocation of the singer, determined to mingle with people to share their moods and passions. An incompatibility that only the euphoria over the project's extraordinary artistic quality had managed to contain up to that point.

When "Automobili" comes out, in short, the Dalla-Roversi partnership is already in ruins. And yet, from this troubled gestation comes what is universally recognised as the most interesting and cohesive chapter of the trilogy, both lyrically and in terms of arrangements, entirely handled by Dalla with the contribution, for the first time, of 4 musicians who, years later, would go on to form Stadio (Giovanni Pezzoli, Marco Nanni, Ricky Portera and Gaetano Curreri). It's also the record containing the longest tracks, true suites, which bring to fruition the most brilliant progressive, jazz and folk ideas found in the first two chapters.

What deeply inspires the two authors is precisely the record's strong central theme: a kind of concept album about the automobile, seen as the symbol of an unchecked modernity that advances by reshaping the landscape through asphalt, motorways and viaducts, sealing the death of rural civilisation. A perspective in which even the creation of a hero-champion like Nuvolari and the myth of the Mille Miglia served the purpose of post-war propaganda in favour of that industrial model.

Dalla – despite Roversi's accusations – is all too convinced of the political nature of the project, which he presents with words that today may sound incredibly ideological and extreme: "Without the automobile we wouldn't have had the phenomenon of great masses moving daily toward the big city from the surrounding hinterland, we wouldn't have had the centralisation of productivity and social services but rather a decentralisation that would have let the inhabitants of small towns feel as integrated into the life of the nation as those living in the big cities." From being a "means of escape from daily routine", according to Dalla, the automobile has become "a vehicle for exercising one's own individual violence, for establishing one's own isolation, for avoiding unwanted human contact".

A full-blown demonisation, against which even the words of the ideologue Roversi sound more nuanced by comparison: "The automobile is nothing but a pretext for tackling quite different, emblematic situations. At its root lies an issue very close to my heart: I believe it's urgent to redraw the map of man, of his feelings, in order to relocate him precisely within the present moment, in which the crisis of the capitalist model — of which the car is both symbol and driver of development — forces us to recover our deepest values, which have been violated and forcibly pushed into oblivion: the rediscovery of human feelings, of tenderness." An approach that may recall the De Gregori of two years later ("La dolcezza cui tutti hanno diritto", from "La campana") and which in some ways clashes with the ideological fervour of the project. But it's precisely in these contradictions, in this complex hybrid of politics, feelings and popular vocation, that "Automobili" finds its most authentic raison d'être, as well as in a formidable musical pastiche capable of shifting effortlessly from the avant-garde to pop.

The car as a symbol of modernity, then, but also as mythology, a futurist celebration of power and speed. A theme to which, within the record, a sort of "epic poem" is dedicated, structured in three chapters: "Mille Miglia, Prima", "Nuvolari", "Mille miglia del '47". In the final recording, however, the first and third tracks were merged, thereby compromising the sequence intended by Roversi, who meant to start from the 1930 race marked by Nuvolari's first victory, then focus on the man himself in the eponymous track, and finally bring things full circle with the legendary 1947 Mille Miglia. In our analysis, then, we will try to restore the original sequence, built as a kind of crescendo that was unfortunately lost on the record.

Introduced by Tony Esposito's "tarantella-like" percussion, the first part of the suite "Mille miglia" delves into the ruins of rural Italy devastated by the Great War, which experiences the feats of the racing aces with its "heart devoured". In an epic of "oil splashes and bursts of dirt", the "flying man from Mantua" dominates with his car. A track with a circular structure, almost as if to mirror the characteristics of the figure-eight-shaped route that connected Brescia to Rome, covering a distance of roughly 1,600 km. The intense description of the race unfolds across twelve stanzas, of which the first two and the last two serve respectively as prologue and epilogue – and are among the most striking of the entire trilogy:

Partivano di notte, arrivavano di sera

Lungo mille chilometri di una fantastica carrera

Quando facevano ritorno

Il cielo scendeva basso

Colpiva la terra al cuore come un sasso

Poi il sole si spaccava contro il ferro dei gasometri

E dall'alto lasciava una riga rossa di sangue

Sulla strada per chilometri, mentre sul prato italiano

There was dry death that mowed down the wheat (…)

 

Partono a notte fonda coi fari accesi sull'onda

E i pioppi in Lombardia te li strappano via

Sbuffi di polvere, zaffate d'olio

I reek of gasoline through the streets of a rural Italy

The unsettling image of sudden, "dry" death, portrayed through the figure of the reaper cutting down the wheat, alludes both to the blood shed by farm laborers in the uprisings of the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the sacrifice of the drivers, willing to risk their lives on the track. The remaining verses, meanwhile, are tasked with describing, in a kind of breathless play-by-play, the various phases of the race, which closes with the triumph of the "flying man from Mantua". With the central moment captured in a strikingly evocative image: "The dust raises a sheet in the wind/ And covers this furious clash" (cf. Matteo Totaro – "Un dialogo tra autori: Roberto Roversi e Lucio Dalla" for "Automobili", 1976).

A text that is a great impressionistic fresco and that, in the author's intentions, sets the stage for the irresistible ode dedicated to the winner of the race:

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The hero of the Mille Miglia is thus not a warrior out of Greek mythology, but a man in whom Dalla seems to see almost a projection of his own physical limitations (he is “short in stature”, “below average”, he “has fifty kilos of bones”). Limitations overcome, however, by a supernatural strength, because “there's always one more number in fate when Nuvolari races”, and so even when his single-seater goes off the road, in a hell of “water, hail and wind”, he “rinasce come rinasce il ramarro/ batte Varzi, Campari/ Borzacchini e Fagioli/ Brilli-Peri e Ascari”.

For Dalla, Nuvolari is a hero suspended between past and future: “He was someone who, with his imagination, managed to invent something new in every race – the singer-songwriter recalled in a 1976 interview – How to fix a car, how to walk away unscathed from a terrifying crash, how to win three races in a row in a single day. When Nuvolari was around, success was guaranteed. He was a pure champion, a hero by vocation... Perhaps Nuvolari didn't know he was being used, in 1930 the automobile was still an unknown quantity and he was the good hero fighting for progress”. At the same time, however, Nuvolari was unwittingly the bearer of a threat:

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But on the whole, the figure of Tazio Nuvolari fascinates its authors as the genuine myth of a working-class Italy that, for him, “arrives in droves and spreads out on the meadows”, waiting for his arrival “for hours and hours” and then “jumps to its feet and waves at him, shouting words of love”. Also notable is the song's musical setting: a light swing number with retro 1930s-40s female backing vocals in the style of the Trio Lescano, over which Dalla builds one of his most mimetic and theatrical vocal performances.

Nuvolari is thus a challenge to the limits of human possibility, and even to death itself. Following a dramatic crash, the newspapers reported him dead, and on that occasion the man from Mantua came out with his famous line: “When they report me dead, always wait three days before crying. You never know”. The most daredevil driver of them all, who had risked his life in every race and survived countless crashes, would die at 61 in his own bed. Varzi, Campari, Borzacchini, Materassi, Brilli-Peri, Arcangeli and Bordino had all died racing.

Following, then, in the original sequence, the final climax of “Mille Miglia del '47”, where the language itself grows more tense and dramatic:

An epic race was upon the green heart of Jesus

On his side dirtied with love, the Mille Miglia of '47

A heart-splitting race, harder than ever before

A true crucifixion, an orchestral execution

An adventure of rain and fear, an authentic massacre

An ancient feast, rubble and houses, a real storm

And despite the euphoric refrain ("Nuvola, Nuvolari, sei una nuvola nera!"), lit up by a Bixio-style charleston, even the description of the race grows darker, driving the blade into the wounds of an Italy with a "devoured heart":

Nuvola Nuvolari sei una nuvola nera

Dentro a un cielo sereno sfascio di primavera

A cielo aperto quando sbatti il martello sulla sorte

Ma se cerchi la morte la tua morte non verrà

Mantovano volante, vetro di biacca e di cuore

Sulla CisItalia millecento se ne frega anche della vita

Ometto di Keaton che corre per la vittoria

Sbattevano gli alberi mentre la corsa passava

Italy's heart was devoured as the champions tore down the straights

They were a flash, barely visible

And while "Biondetti, filthy as a dog" crosses the finish line first, Roversi's lens once again zooms in to magnify "the rubble of war" of "Italy, eyes devoured on the ground", closing this extraordinary three-act automotive epic in the most epic way possible.

Also worth highlighting is the "anthropomorphization" of the cars that Roversi achieves through verbs and adjectives belonging to the human sphere rather than the "mechanical" one. In "Mille Miglia – prima" we read "the big engines roar", in "Nuvolari" "the engine is ferocious", in "Mille Miglia del '47" "the roar of the engines", not to mention the lines in which the author uses the image of a "harpooned dolphin" to describe the pitiful state, near the finish line, of Nuvolari's car, reduced to "a few sheets of metal, the wheel, the tyres" (cf. Matteo Totaro – "Un dialogo tra autori: Roberto Roversi e Lucio Dalla" for "Automobili", 1976).

The rearrangement of the tracks within the tracklist, compared to the original sequence, also alters its essentially tripartite structure. The project was in fact built around three phases, relating to the past, present and future of the automobile. After the epic of the past, then, the present appears as a gigantic "Traffic Jam" with "a hundred thousand cars gridlocked", in which "for twelve hours no one has moved". A collective hallucination built on a succession of panels, using a technique that will certainly prove useful to Dalla on "L'ultima luna" three years later. A track that starts off quietly, with the voice distorted by echo and solemn organ chords, before gathering pace to the puffing rhythm of the synths. Inspired by a real news story, "L'ingorgo" narrates the dramatic situation that arose on the French motorway near Paris following one of the first cases of road-network collapse, underlining man's sense of alienation as a prisoner of his own invention. A sense of inhumanity broken by one of those illuminating details that Dalla, in his future as a songwriter, would always handle with mastery:

A day goes by and evening comes

The night passes and day returns

At nine o'clock a stranger arrives

And asks for bread from the people around him

The physicality of the gesture, the simplicity of the request, stand in contrast to the monstrousness of the motorway traffic jam. As if man, prisoner of the heat and that inferno of metal, had nothing left but a few scraps of ordinary daily life: “A mezzogiorno si sbriciola un biscotto/ L’ingegnere dorme nella Taurus/ Un muso di cane contro il vetro rotto”, “Dividono sul bordo della strada/ L’ultimo cracker, l’ultima bottiglia/ La Coca-Cola è razionata a gocce/ Due gocce solo per le labbra rotte”, until “Verso sera qualcosa si muove/ Con uno strappo la fila si snoda/ Come un gatto che si morde la coda/ Le macchine procedono in pariglia”. The musical framing is equally perfect: each phase of the story is in fact marked by a melodic motif that brings out its particular character, first matching the drivers' weariness with a languid arrangement, then their sense of euphoria and release in the more rhythmic, driving theme of the finale.

The second lyric devoted to the present is, instead, another dazzling snapshot. "Two kids" shut inside a wrecked car at the edge of a field, loving each other, oblivious to everything (“Baciarsi dieci volte senza paura in un minuto/ Parlare di oggi, parlare d’amore, parlare domani/ Toccarsi con le mani”). This time the metaphor is almost too obvious: the search for intimacy and feeling as an antidote to widespread dehumanization, symbolized once again by the car, which here however becomes "battered" and turns into a warm alcove, ready to welcome the universal love of the two kids described as "timeless", as if they ideally embodied all lovers of all eras. With an illuminating glimpse of a future "green, cold, and deep as the sea". And the suspicion that this very line inspired Dalla's masterpiece a year later is more than a hunch. The poignant symphonic openings, meanwhile, help charge the album's most touching episode with pathos.

But while "Due ragazzi" offers a glimmer of hope, rebalancing the unsettling relationship with the automobile's future by repurposing it for a use other than the one it was designed for, the solemn prophecy of "Il motore del Duemila" sinks into grim sarcasm, illustrating the astonishing features of futuristic pseudo-ecological systems:

The engine of the year 2000

Will be beautiful and shining

Will be fast and silent

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In the midst of this idyllic, unreal atmosphere, buoyed by airy arrangements, there nevertheless creeps in an anguish over a far less reassuring future for humanity, with spectral synth breaks introducing the final dilemma: we know everything about the engine, but how will the heart of the child of the year 2000 work? Because – as Roversi points out – "the transformation under way, which has turned the car into a kind of anthropomorphic subject, now needs humanity."

Originally conceived as the closing track of the collection, if we set aside the stand-alone episode of "Interview con l'Avvocato" placed last in the running order, "Il motore del Duemila" – as Totaro recalls in his essay – represents the album's moment of greatest tension, an extreme synthesis of the ideas that the other songs develop with a broader array of linguistic devices. The musical accompaniment plays a decisive role in how the lyrics function, immersing the narrative in a bleak, glacial atmosphere close to the icy visions painted so masterfully by director Fritz Lang in his masterpiece "Metropolis". It's also worth stressing the disastrous decision by Rca to reverse the running order of the tracks, distorting the album's entire message. "Placing 'Due ragazzi' in the final slot," Totaro further writes, "has the effect of radically overturning the bleak omen suggested by Roversi in 'Il motore del Duemila': through the episode – functioning as a happy ending – of the two lovers who choose a scrapped car as the nook for their intimacy, a proud two-fingered salute to car culture, the album inevitably takes on a more reassuring but inevitably less intense mood. The ending is thus sweetened, and the pessimistic outlook prophesied by the author is almost reversed, much to Rca's satisfaction."

The album's final track, serving either as a prologue (in the reshuffled version released on record) or as an epilogue (as its author intended in "Il futuro dell'automobile"), is the brilliant "Interview con l'Avvocato". If for Dalla and Roversi the future of industrial society is an immense black hole in which every question goes unanswered, then even the media can only produce empty chatter. Hence this surreal "interview" in which Gianni Agnelli explains the future of the car industry to a reporter from the Manchester Guardian. Dalla, accompanying himself on piano with a deliberately deflating gait, performs it in inimitable cabaret style: he has the head of Fiat recite a comic pseudo-English grammelot, sings in scat, and delivers an outrageous vocal "solo", closing with a question that is really meant as a bleak prophecy:

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Like flashing on the sea

It won't turn out exactly like that, but in 1976 no one in Italy could have gotten away with such a jab at one of the country's most powerful men. And who knows what would have happened if other impertinent questions from Roversi hadn't been cut from the text at Rca's request, such as:

A child wrote

in a recent investigation

'Concentration camp in an Italian school':

'My father is poor and thin,

poor, thin and short'

But wouldn't the car have a future

if it could take for a ride

that father too, along with that child,

pulling them out of their fate?

 

From the Ekofisk field

spewing crude oil like machine-gun fire

up there in the North Sea

there's oil for Italy

An island a kilometre long

with tanks of concrete and steel

But doesn't the fire of this future too

burn only those at the bottom?

These are lines taken from the original manuscript, which can be read inside the aforementioned box set, along with all of Roversi's various annotations, some of which are also available on the website of his Archive www.robertoroversi.it/.

Too uncomfortable and incendiary for its time, "Interview con l'Avvocato" would be censored by the media even more than RCA had censored it, condemning it to early obscurity. Yet its biting impertinence still holds true in today's Italy, where economic powers are no less privileged and where, in the age of electric cars and eco-friendly devices, pollution remains at the centre of political debate. And if the "kid of the year 2000" may not be alienated by the heavy use of cars, other technological tools will be there to threaten the dynamics of society.

Despite its experimental streak and political rigour, the album is well received by the public, buoyed by quirky live shows close in spirit to the theatre of Giorgio Gaber and Dario Fo. It's Fo himself who would offer one of the finest and most fitting portraits of Dalla: "He is one of the greatest Italian singers," the future Nobel laureate would state. "He doesn't perform a song, he embodies it; he doesn't recite a piece, he unfolds it, using - beyond his voice - his entire physical, bodily, gestural presence. The pause and the gesture, facial expression and grimace, the freeing and occupying of space: in Dalla, all of this is the fundamental key to performance."

But after the troubled affair of "Automobili", it's clear there is no more room for reconciliation within the Bolognese duo. Roversi thus returns to his work as a poet, while Dalla decides to take the big step: from now on, he will write the lyrics to his own songs himself. Starting with a masterpiece titled "How Deep Is the Sea" (1977). But that is a whole other story.

The unreleased tracks

The much-mentioned box set "Nevica sulla mia mano" includes an entire disc of unreleased material, fourteen songs in all, comprising tracks censored from "Automobili" as well as others written by Roversi for a possible fourth chapter of the collaboration. Most of it is material tied to the themes of the trilogy, and in particular to its third act. Among these are "I muri del '21" (about the closure of the Fiat plants following workers' protests against layoffs), "Statale adriatica chilometro 220", "Rodeo" and "La signora di Bologna", in which the fortune-teller with eyes as green as the fields of Italy's past becomes a symbol of the coming of industrial civilisation.

Also included are the uncensored edition of "Interview con l'Avvocato", in a version that actually differs from the manuscript published in the same collection, and the five songs written by the Bolognese poet for Enzo Re and performed by Dalla on that occasion, as well as a spoken segment from a 1973 concert in which the singer presents his new artistic project. The collection closes with the three demos of the songs "Nuvolari", "Carmen Colon" and "Le parole incrociate".

Beyond the treat of the disc of unreleased material, the "Nevica sulla mia mano" collection is nonetheless a must for all fans of the duo, with its inexhaustible trove of testimonies, images and curiosities. Did you know, for instance, who wrote the first draft of "Chiedi chi erano i Beatles", which Lucio Dalla gave to Stadio, sending it up the charts? Yes indeed, none other than the uncompromising Roberto Roversi.

Rift and reconciliation

Still, mending the pieces of the relationship between the two would not be easy. In 1982, Lucio Dalla, fresh off an extraordinary run of solo hits, would go so far as to confess in an interview: "The period with Roversi wasn't a happy one for me, in fact it was quite traumatic. He's a pure person, and I distrust pure people. Those songs were somewhat pseudo-intellectual. And besides, I don't like epic music, it bothers me even physically. I didn't enjoy shouting those songs, as if they were being sung on a table by someone who had figured everything out and was far ahead of everyone else." And indeed, he would stop performing them live, except for "Nuvolari" and a handful of rare exceptions.

Peace would only return in 1990. As a gesture of reconciliation, Dalla included on the LP "Cambio" a text Roversi had sent him back in 1978, "Cambia la faccia di Dio", which he titled "Comunista". The poet was moved by this and reciprocated by involving him in his show "Enzo Re", an old theatrical pièce that would be revived precisely with the help of five new songs written by Dalla.

From then on, the hatchet would be buried for good. "What drew me to Lucio Dalla, more than his human and artistic restlessness, was his impatience with normal standards," Roversi would acknowledge in 2007. "Dalla is a man, as well as an artist and a singer, always one step ahead of his own body. He treads on his own shadow, which lies in front of him rather than behind his back, and is therefore a miraculous experimenter. He has an extraordinary voice and a mental and cultural vitality that I'd call scattered in the best sense: for him, anything can come in, anything can be experimented with." "I learned everything from Roversi," Lucio would later admit, "to write my own words myself, but above all else, pure emotion."

The two of them went on sharing a stretch of life together in their native Bologna, until, in 2012, fate took them both away: Lucio in March and Roberto in September. Shortly before Dalla's sudden death, Roversi would once again pay tribute to him, turning a critical eye on himself: "Together we made 35-36 songs across three albums, plus a few scattered ones: we gave something to Italian song. Lucio's later songs bear his own personality, they're his own lyrics and they're excellent, limpid, not as convoluted as the ones I used to give him. He taught me a lot, he gave me a lesson - maybe I was the one who changed after meeting him."

Even if today they may seem utopian, overly ideological or simply dated, the reflections contained in the Dalla-Roversi trilogy represented a lofty and unrepeatable moment of encounter/clash between literature and song, one with almost no equal in the history of Italian music. But above all, those strange and moving stories - musically enriched by Dalla's compositional talent and the jazz-inflected improvisations of his musicians - managed to give voice to all the contradictions, ideal impulses and unresolved enigmas of post-war Italy. An Italy that, looking closely, doesn't seem so far removed from today's.

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