The 1983 meeting

Vasco Rossi and Enzo Jannacci: two seemingly very distant worlds, yet ones that actually found more than one point of contact. In particular, the singer-songwriter from Zocca has never hidden his debt to the brilliant Milanese artist, who passed away on 29 March 2013. “I discovered Jannacci when I was 16,” he recalled in an interview. “His songs in Milanese dialect won me over immediately. They were funny and original. They painted portraits of desperate, unlucky characters. The last, not the first. The antiheroes, ordinary people (Armando, Vincenzina...). His bitter irony, his subtle, biting, sharp and irresistible satire later led him to write some of the greatest masterpieces of Italian song. 'Vengo anch'io', 'Quelli che', 'Se me lo dicevi prima' are just the first that come to mind.” This admiration inevitably left its mark on the Emilian songwriter's own writing: “For the critics, you were either a singer-songwriter or you were pop,” Vasco Rossi would later explain. “That's why I was thinking of a popular kind of rock, even though I'd grown up on singer-songwriters. I wouldn't have written 'Siamo solo noi' without Enzo Jannacci's 'Quelli che', which was an open-ended lyric, you could change it every night. It was too far ahead, new, and even perfect in every way — I loved it with all my heart.”

If at first glance the differences between the two seem obvious – in vocabulary, in style, and in their very musical background – common ground can be found in their shared vision of the “last,” the antiheroes, fragile characters often on the margins, who populate Jannacci's songbook and whom Vasco translates into a more direct language, more in tune with his own generation.

The two also had the chance to meet in person. It happened in 1983 on the TV variety show “Gransimpatico,” hosted by Jannacci on Rai2. Vasco Rossi had just bewitched the Sanremo audience with “Vita spericolata” – despite its placing in the final rankings – while Enzo Jannacci was already a revered master of Italian song. The duet between the two – with Jannacci at the piano and Vasco lip-syncing without even a microphone in front of him – may not rank among the finest ever performed, but it remains memorable for its symbolic and historical significance, cementing the secret bond between the young Emilian rocker, who was exploding onto the scene in those very days thanks to the album “Bollicine”, and his Milanese mentor.

Jannacci would return to singing “Vita spericolata” in 1998, fifteen years after that duet. This time alone, at Sanremo Top, the year of his comeback to the festival with “Quando un musicista ride”.

Vasco Rossi, for his part, would recall keeping like a relic, faithfully framed in his studio, this letter full of esteem and affection that he received from Jannacci: “Dear Vasco, we've only met face to face a couple of times, I particularly remember on one of my TV shows... I also remember you weren't feeling very well, but I thanked you right away for singing Vita spericolata with me. Of course, as I saw you a few years earlier at the Sanremo Festival, when you made no impression at all because you were shy and it was clear you wanted to run away, I immediately said: 'This one's a genius, destined to go a long way,' because truth shone out of every glance of yours. Now, I have few things, but having a big nose I have a great instinct for what, in three words and a look, radiates truth. And indeed I was right. Someone once said, who knows when, that truth lies at the bottom of a well. He was wrong, because truth lies at the bottom of the soul, and millions of kids understood that and keep understanding it. Vasco, heartfelt thanks from an old singer-songwriter, whom you tried to help and to whom you gave the real push to carry on. Yours, Enzo Jannacci”.

Years after Enzo Jannacci's passing, his immense legacy continues to be reread through new projects as well. Among them, the docu-film directed by Giorgio Verdelli, made with the collaboration of his son Paolo Jannacci, which gathers testimonies from artists of the Italian scene, including Vasco himself. One more piece in reconstructing the cultural weight of a figure who left a deep, often subterranean mark on several generations of musicians.

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19/04/2026