Piero Ciampi - La guerra di Piero

Every night, Piero Ciampi collected women whose names he could barely remember a few hours later; he truly loved only two of them, and he lost both, through his own fault, forever. Piero Ciampi started drinking first thing in the morning to clear his head, watering down his thoughts and stirring them into little poems until sleep granted a truce from his dark musings. Piero Ciampi gives himself wholly to the people he meets, or else he punches them. Anything to hack away, axe-blow by axe-blow, at the forest of indifference surrounding him. Piero Ciampi is a friend to dockers, road workers and the unemployed as much as, if not more than, he is to intellectuals like Moravia, Bene or Schifano. Piero Ciampi charges five hundred thousand lire (in the Seventies!) to sing half a song and tell the audience to go to hell. Piero Ciampi is hated by his colleagues, by record labels, by radio and television. Piero Ciampi spits in the face of success every chance he gets, and, you can bet on it, takes mad pleasure in watching it all go to ruin. The only formality he cares about, in this world, is being called a poet, and he schemes so hard that he even manages to get this blasphemy against the culture industry printed, in plain letters, on his grimy, crumpled passport, under "occupation".

Piero Ciampi is a door flung wide open onto the darkest and most (im)possible worlds of the Italian song tradition. Against a backdrop so seemingly bleak and desolate that some rushed to shut that door again, or at best to institutionalize it with a plaque, an award, as had already happened with Tenco. Beware of reappraisals. He is Corto Maltese venturing out on his final journey, the one "to the edge of the night". His is a lucid, wry, moved and self-aware gaze upon cupio dissolvi. A challenge already lost from the start, yet taken up against all logic, a defeat met with a smile on one's lips, like William Holden in "The Wild Bunch". Because what matters is not so much victory as action, as in Hemingway. To have or not to have amounts to the same thing. What matters is to down it all in one gulp and wake up who knows where at the following dawn. His life is a work of art as mysterious and troubled as the art that inspired him his whole life long. Music is only a pretext. What matters is living. His own way, always and regardless. Piero Ciampi is a leftover of "bohème", born in the wrong century. A Bianciardi-style anarchist. A clochard, a ringmaster with no troupe, the demon lurking at the bottom of yet another bottle. He is the loose cannon that blows up the apparent gap between market and ideology. Between Sanremo and the singer-songwriter tradition. And we should all be grateful to him for it. What does he have to do with Italian music? No, rather, what does Italian music have to do with someone like him.

Sul porto di Livorno

Piero Ciampi was born in Livorno on 28 September 1934, in the Pontino district. A western port looking out onto the distant Atlantic. A seafaring stronghold crisscrossed by "fossi" (canals), docks and "cantine" (wine cellars). A casbah fragrant with brackish smells and mirages of faraway lands (“Io non ho lasciato il mio cuore/ A San Francisco/ Io ho lasciato il mio cuore/ Sul porto di Livorno/ Le luci si accendevano sul mare/ Era un giorno strano:/ Mi rifiutai di credere che fossero lampare” he would write many years later).

Piero's father was a leather merchant ("of leather", that is, not "of pearls" as a rumour repeated more than once by the newspapers would have it), who had two wives and three children and would outlive all three of them.

Livorno would always remain the free port of his gypsy soul. A city of sudden farewells and fleeting reunions. A den that Piero would have to leave for the first time as early as 1943, after the first tragic bombing of Livorno, which completely devastated the port area, claiming almost six thousand victims and forcing his family to take shelter in the countryside around Pisa. Once of age, Piero enrolled in the engineering faculty of the University of Pisa. But it didn't last long: a few exams and he was back in Livorno — music was in his future.

With his brothers he put together a trio where he was able to test out his highly distinctive singing style — closer to the great showmen of France (a bit Yves Montand, a bit Boris Vian) than to homegrown "tenors" — harsh and surly, at times almost haughty, yet capable of the sweetest melodic sighs — and to do a bit of apprenticeship in small dance halls. To earn a living he sold oil at a warehouse inside the port. Then he was called up for military service, doing his basic training in Pesaro, where he met, among others, Gianfranco Reverberi, and where his arrival would hardly go unnoticed, already blatantly revealing all the distinctive traits of a volcanic personality: he drank "like an Irishwoman", "nothing scared him, least of all a bully", to the point of deliberately picking fights with the senior conscripts, and was, to put it mildly, intolerant of military discipline; he would recite, to the hilarity of the barracks, outlandish poems made up on the spot, and wrote touching love letters with which he made his commanding officer's daughter fall for him; on his days off he went around playing in whatever venue would have him.

After being discharged, around the mid-1950s he played double bass for a while (his instrument, before the piano) in the little orchestras of Versilia, but that music didn't move him — it wasn't his, he didn't like it, and the garish backdrop of the nascent holiday "boom" — small-time bosses with their girlfriends, rich kids in sports cars, the "poor but handsome" types branded "vulgarly pornographic" or "disturbers of conscience" by the Pope himself — was, if anything, even more indigestible and stifling to him.

It was 1957. In those days, for someone like him, there was one destination and one only: Paris, via Genoa, a journey undertaken on a wing and a prayer, without a penny in his pocket, washing up in the city of painters, existentialism and chansonniers. Another Livorno native after Modigliani. Piero hung around Céline and drank to his health, went to see Brassens and was utterly dazzled, for a while getting by on tricks, hunger and makeshift schemes, until he had an idea that might change his life (though, as we'll see, in the end it wouldn't): singing the poems he scratched out drunk on cocktail napkins in the half-empty, disreputable dives that had the misfortune of hosting him. He was good, but he was already a case apart. He did things that were still virtually unheard of in Italy. He resembled a singer-songwriter fashionable at the time, Felix Léclerc. But he was Italian. So he began to make a name for himself (and, for that matter, a surname too): "Piero L'Italianò". Clipped and accented, French-style, the way the cousins across the border like it. He drank it all away.

In 1959 came the return to Italy, back to Livorno, once again penniless, exactly as he'd been when he left. But something was changing. It was 1960: a widespread unease was creeping through the country, Tambroni was in government with the external backing of the Movimento Sociale, and Scelba, in Reggio Emilia, was opening fire on workers (we wish it were a metaphor, but unfortunately for our country, it isn't). A new generation of musicians was emerging on the scene: the first singer-songwriters. From the French school to the Genoese one. Piero's path crossed again with that of Reverberi, deus ex machina of the Ligurian scene, who was now working in Milan for Ricordi, the record-label hub of the young "highbrow" music scene (which at the time meant mostly Bindi and Paoli, or at most the still-marginal Tenco and Endrigo), as a producer and arranger.

Autumn in Milan

He was a strange kind of singer-songwriter, the one who landed in the city of the two Manzonis in the early months of 1960. A Martian in Milan. Piero Ciampi stayed true to form: too "Italian" for the French, too "French" for the Italians. Too raw to set a standard, and too much himself to break through. He was signed by Guido Crepax, on the Bluebell label owned by Antonio Casetta, for which he cut the obligatory singles under the name Piero Litaliano. Naturalised, without apostrophe and without accent.

These prosodic corrections partly capture the meaning of this first experience of his with the music industry: shackled by the orchestral pop-jazz of the Milanese label, he comes across like a Vian or a Bécaud forced, against his will, to sing like Modugno. The debut, however, is dazzling — a comet that burns fast and passes only once, while all eyes are turned elsewhere. Side A: "Comphiteor", a shocking spoken intro that foreshadows the masterpieces of the mature Ciampi, followed by an unconvincing stab at the style of the singer-songwriter behind "L'Uomo In Frak", punctuated by surreal childlike choruses in Reverberi's style (a trademark of his: just think of the "Girotondo" in De André's "Tutti Morimmo A Stento"). But what strikes most is the lyric, something unheard-of in the "love/heart" landscape of the previous decade: Ciampi writes a micro-drama in zero acts, the spoken self-portrait of a self-destructive loser who barely regrets being one (“che una volta in una rissa, mi sono arreso a un nano (…) e giuro ogni mattina di fare grandi cose/ ma quando vien la sera che ho fatto? Niente/ che gioco sui cavalli il soldo che mi resta/ e tengo nelle tasche sogni strani”), unveiling the dark side of petit-bourgeois normality (“Mia madre, quando parla di me, dice che sono un buon figlio/ i miei fratelli mi chiamano il loro buon fratello/ i miei amici poi, dicono che sono un loro buon amico, ma loro non sanno…”) with tragicomic inflections worthy of a Cecco Angiolieri.

Side B, by comparison, fades mercilessly under the weight of the years: "La Grotta Dell'Amore", an idyllic fantasy shot through with flashes of madness, somewhere between Marino Marini's intimate jazz and Modugno's Mediterranean shouting.

In 1961 came the double A-side "L'Ultima Volta Che La Vidi"/"Quando Si Leva Il Vento": the first is still remarkable, with its folk-epic sweep à la Rustichelli, the orchestral crescendos, the touching female backing vocals, echoes — perhaps unintentional — of Camus ("in this life I am a stranger"), and masterful lines like “io non posso più andare/ tra i sorrisi della gente/ né chiedere alle cose un posto in mezzo a loro”; the second is more mannered, a fifties-style orchestral italo-pop tinged with jazz.

The following year he released another marginal, derivative track, "Alè Alè", an attempt to chase Buscaglione's cabaret swing, and one strikingly ahead of its time, "Non Siamo Tutti Eroi", with its Reverberi/Morricone-style pathos, a post-war anti-epic sketched in fairy-tale brushstrokes anticipating "40 Soldati e 40 Sorelle" — war seen from the side of the innocent victims, who in the end all resemble one another and for that reason, as in Pavese, "demand an answer of us".

In the meantime he had moved to Cgd, still with Crepax, who in 1963 released his debut LP. Piero Litaliano (mostly a collection of singles) is a decently crafted record, one that adheres flatly to early-1960s pop standards and, while lacking the limpid mastery of a Paoli, the virtuosic compositional richness of a Bindi, or the noir soul and polemical sharpness of a Tenco for this kind of song, still displays a handful of flashes of brilliance that lift it well above the pack of standard pop fare.

Amid echoes of Paoli (in the melodic framework of "Fino All'Ultimo Minuto", which is practically the same as "Senza Fine", and in the orchestral "Il Tuo Ricordo", carried by an almost impalpable rhythm section) and of Tenco (the bitter "Non So Più Niente" with its alternating patterns of horns and violins, and the Danube-tinged "Qualcuno Tornerà"), intimate pieces like "Autunno A Milano" (a handful of autobiographical, revealing details, tossed in almost casually to lend weight to the clichés of love lyrics), "Ho Lasciato A Casa Il Tuo Sorriso" and "Quando Il Giorno Tornerà" (the "whispered" verse à la Henri Salvador and the decidedly Italian-flavoured chorus) take shape the last gems signed "Litaliano" and the first glimmers of the truest Ciampi: the contagious, ironic melancholy of "Fra Cent'Anni"; "La Polvere Si Alza", with its mournful strings, cracked as in a Morricone-style deguello, and Piero decidedly more at ease in spoken recitation than in the sweeping bel canto of the chorus; "Confesso", almost a remake, only slightly more politically correct, of "Comphiteor" — a coward posing as a hero like Céline's Bardamu, the tragedy of the performer, a clown on the verge of a nervous breakdown — laid bare over a brilliant big-band jazz theme that sounds straight out of a James Bond film; and, dulcis in fundo, "Non Chiedermi Più", finally worthy of a Brel, where he already hones that unkempt, conversational, theatrical, overflowing style that would come to define the dialogue/invective between him and a complicated, recalcitrant lover ("you've spent years going on with that head of yours full of incomprehension").

Tomorrow's singer

“Tomorrow's singer will be launched like a detergent, the song industry is modernizing itself. […] Nowadays prefabricated hits are manufactured to order. This young man is called Piero Litaliano and his name, within a few months, will be on everyone's lips: the records, the posters and the advertising slogans are already ready. […] Within six months, a year at the most, Piero Litaliano will be as popular as Mina. […] he is the new singer, scientifically built for 1962.”.

Instead, nothing. Despite the ravings of the “Domenica del Corriere”, nothing comes of it at all. Nothing more, same as nothing. Piero is the singer of a tomorrow so distant that, in order to find one of his albums for sale at the local record shop, you'll have to wait until 1990. The irony of it all.

Things close down in Milan, and he goes back to Livorno, where he meets a man named Gaetano Pulvirenti, a former Rca employee, who offers him a desk job writing radio jingles and running his small record label, Ariel. Between the two of them, for once, Piero isn't the craziest one. He produces a couple of 45s for Giorgia Moll, a minor star of the “caroselli” TV ads, then, while the popular Milly remakes his “Autunno A Milano” (1964), he writes a tune called “Ho Bisogno Di Vederti”, so brazen in adapting the template of “Tous le Garçons et Le Fille” to the chaste clichés of Italian melody that it's almost a stroke of genius. The song, performed by Gigliola Cinquetti, will come fourth at the 1965 Sanremo Festival. But the commercial returns are disheartening, so much so that Ariel soon shuts its doors.

He tries again (with Sibilla, this time) and bets everything on a singer named Lucia Rango, for whom he writes, arranges and produces (together with Elvio Monti) an album pompously titled “Lucia Rango Show”, built on new songs and on half-hearted rehashes from the Piero Litaliano record. But rest assured that, like the inveterate gambler of his “Il Giocatore”, he'll soon have cause to regret it.

It's 1967, and Piero's life is already an unreturnable “trans-alcoholic” odyssey: spotted in the most improbable places, from Ireland to Sweden to Spain, even in Japan, as if he were the Flying Dutchman, he has just burned through one marriage (to an Irishwoman named Moira, who gave him a son in 1963 and left shortly after) and will soon send up in smoke another (with Gabriella, from Rome, the other of the “two women (…) beautiful, blonde, tall and slim” who “(…) no longer exist for him”, as cited in “Ha Tutte Le Carte In Regola”). Luckily for him (and for us), the Seventies are now at the door. It's the decade he won't come out of alive, his moment of greatest brilliance, the temporal span that envelops all of his masterpieces.

He's got all the right cards

There are two key figures in this descent/ascent into the absurd and brilliant precipices of his own creativity. The first is Gino Paoli, a longtime friend of Piero's (in 1962 he had been the first to record one of his songs, “Le Cose Dell’Amore”, and in 1980, after his death, he would dedicate an entire tribute album to him titled, unsurprisingly, “Ha Tutte Le Carte In Regola”), who digs him up from who knows where and hauls him bodily into the offices of Rca, presenting him as a sort of goose that lays golden eggs (“He's got all the right cards!”, he must have sworn), vouching for him on the strength of his own contractual clout.

Moral of the story: Piero pockets the record company's advance, spends it all before recording a single track, and comes back asking for more. It ends with the major label dropping his contract and offloading him onto a subsidiary, Amico (founded a few years earlier by Don Backy, Detto Mariano and other defectors from Celentano's Clan).

And it's luck, the classic luck of drunks, the kind that keeps you on your feet, staggering left and right in defiance of the laws of gravity: because this is where his collaboration with Gianni Marchetti begins, of which Piero Ciampi (1971) will be the first, superb fruit. Like Ciampi, Marchetti is a half-genius, misunderstood until then, author of fine film scores for unmarketable films (starting with their titles) like “I vigliacchi non pregano”, “Diario segreto di una minorenne” or “Muori lentamente… te la godi di più”. Their meeting will give rise to one of the most remarkable partnerships between a lyricist and a composer that Italian music history can recall, on a par with a Mogol/Battisti, a Roversi/Dalla or a De André/Piovani, just to stay within those years.

With Marchetti, Piero is finally free to be himself, to express that overflowing individualism, that lyricism without a safety net, that epic of marginalization, that cabaret of everyday madness which is the very hallmark of his poetic writing and his vocal extroversion. Ciampi's is a distinctly oral, dialogic, theatrical, volatile style (it's no coincidence that two of the expressions that recur most frequently in his songs are “Tu” [You] and “No”, that is, the acceptance of the other and its negation, the search for a reconciliation between a need for love, empathy, understanding, and the mad instinct that drives him to break free from the pack to howl alone at the moon): a way of writing, singing and delivering words meant to tear down the fourth wall that divides the author's world from the listener's, yet at the same time alien to mutual populist identification, to any “I am one of you, you speak with my voice”, because it's fiercely out of the question that he could be anyone other than himself, than what he has always been.

Marchetti, with his style rooted in jazz, Mediterranean music and Italian folklore, with his skill at crafting an ironic or dramatic commentary around a given scene (as in his film scores), improvises around the piano (often in tandem with strings and acoustic guitars) garments of shifting, ever-changing fit that adapt perfectly, time after time, to the body of the songs, sometimes plain and patched, sometimes lavish and elegant. Most of the compositions, moreover, forgo the chorus in its classic form, in favor of a repeated, distinctive instrumental refrain, a freedom that still feels estranging within an Italian pop context today.

Eccentric by the songwriting standards of the period and conceived in complete expressive autonomy, Piero Ciampi is a work without a single weak point, one of the highest peaks ever reached by our popular music. The record contains much of the classic repertoire he's remembered for, starting with “Il Vino”, perhaps his best-known song, in whose lyrical and musical caravanserai (a crooked, drunken gait, a popular air, orchestral arrangement, expressionist and theatrical vocals) a whole figure like Capossela is already fully formed; “È Natale il 24”, a poignant and picaresque madrigal with guitars to the fore (alongside woodwinds and strings) that seems like the autobiographical, tragicomic, wayward and surreal crossroads of “Cronache di poveri amanti” and “Amici Miei” (“Io vado/ quando sono abbandonato vado in cerca di una donna/ senza danni sento/ quelle volte che non pago che rimane pure amore/ per un’ ora”); the frantic refrain that staves off a lover's goodbye in “Tu No” (“se non so farti felice anche se continuo a bere, tu no, tu mi devi star vicina, perché ormai io sono fuori, tu no”), like a ghost forced to relive the scene of his own death, right up to the most harrowing admission of powerlessness (“io non so che cosa fare, non capisco questa vita”); or the lost, melancholy elegy of “Livorno”, with its jazzy piano, orchestral chorus, guitar arpeggios and vibraphone chimes.

And the rest is no less remarkable: “Ma Che Buffa Che Sei”, a French-style pianistic suspense (Aznavour), Mediterranean guitar flourishes, a finale with an almost acoustic-prog-like marching pace, but above all a way of “talking about love” – rough and brazen and at the same time sweet and heartbroken – like no one before him (“quel pugno che ti detti/ è un gesto che non mi perdono/ ma il naso ora è diverso/ l’ho fatto io e non dio/ ma che amore che sei/ ma che cara che sei/ quei ragazzi laggiù sembrano noi”); the Milanese glimpses and the stray, middle-aged love affairs – shameful alleys stinking of piss, the smell of wine and cigars on the threshold of taverns, dark rooms and unmade beds – of “Sobborghi” (a dizzying gypsy-style harmony, hand-struck drums and a spoken break worth more than a thousand words “e poi, perché dici amarmi?/ per andare avanti?/ dove?/ No”); the marital infamies and miseries of “L’Amore è Tutto Qui” (harpsichord, punctuated bass, brushes, strings and guitars in the refrain), in which tenderness, regret and a sense of ending all blend together (“non sono morto e tu lo sai/ se ti procuro tanti guai/ perdonami”); the humanistic allegory (childhood memories and memories of the Resistance transfigured into fairy-tale echoes) and the tropical arrangement of “40 Soldati 40 Sorelle”; the orchestral jazz-club sound, with its American flavor, of “Barbara Non C’è”, so languid, refined and retro.

Two more farcical episodes (though only seemingly so: laughter, in fact, is merely the other face of anti-bourgeois contempt and spleen) round out the record: the vaudeville-style sketch of “Il Merlo”, a sort of Roman-style boulevardien recital, and the compulsive gambling sketch that always ends the same way (“Merda!”) in “Il Giocatore” (with folk-dance interludes for strings, woodwinds, acoustic guitar and touches of electric guitar).

I'll Show You Who I Am

Despite a “second debut” whose poetic and musical vitality has few equals in the history of Italian song, Ciampi and Marchetti's efforts go almost completely unnoticed. Rca combines an appearance at the “Disco per l'estate” with “L'amore è tutto qui”, which ends up resignedly in last place. “Tu No” drives Aznavour himself out of his mind, and he invites Ciampi onto “Senza Rete”; Ciampi shows up but then digs his heels in and refuses to sing; it ends with Paolo Villaggio pushing him onto the stage by literally dragging him by the jacket. The album wins the “Premio della Critica”, but no one bothers to promote it properly - least of all Ciampi himself, too caught up in that one-way journey where night can no longer be told apart from daylight. Ciampi doesn't know how to live in the world, can't put things in perspective, can't give them their proper weight: his music and his freedom are the only things that matter to him.

But he has unsuspected creative resources and anger to spare: in 1973 he repeats the feat with a work that worthily continues the new direction inaugurated by the self-titled album. Written, composed and performed in close collaboration with the now-inseparable Marchetti and a Calabrian singer-songwriter named Pino Pavone, Io e Te Abbiamo Perso La Bussola (Amico, 1973) departs even further than its predecessor from the concept of the singer-songwriter record in vogue in the Seventies: an ever more unhappy drifter, Ciampi wanders through stretched-out, dark soundscapes, blended into a score that fits perfectly with his anarchic Italian-style tragicomedy, following a thread centred on personal events (being left by his second wife, the legal proceedings, custody of the children), on themes of separation, detachment, loneliness (in years when divorce was still a touchy subject, as well as a recently won right).

While the masterpieces “Ha Tutte Le Carte In Regola”, perhaps his human and artistic epitaph, and “Io e Te, Maria”, a superb soliloquy in the form of a serenade (guitar, strings, flute, choirs) broken up by constant restarts and changes of tempo and harmony, and the existential cabaret of “Te Lo Faccio Vedere Chi Sono Io” (a sort of satire of bourgeois love in dialogue form) still harken back to the first chapter, tracks like “Il Lavoro” (expansive and narrative, unemployment as a metaphor for a life on the margins of wellbeing and emotional stability: jazzy piano, orchestral filigree, subcutaneous bass), “Mia Moglie” (the peak of his spoken-singing over a theatrical, orchestral soundscape), “In Un Palazzo Di Giustizia” and “Bambino Mio” (lounge jazz with an enveloping, spiralling, seductive accompaniment) effectively represent the new dramatic level Ciampi's art had risen to.

The same year saw the release of Ho Scoperto Che Esisto Anch'io, an extraordinary tribute from one of the most brilliant and borderline performers in Italian song, Nada Malanima, who with her powerful, rough, abrasive, moody voice revisits some vintage Ciampi, “Confiteor” and “L'Amore è Tutto Qui”, alongside a dazzling run of previously unreleased songs all written by the Livorno singer-songwriter together with Marchetti (who also handles the arrangement and orchestration) and Pino Pavone: “Sul Porto Di Livorno” (a poetic, descriptive take of hallucinatory audiovisual power), “La Passeggiata”, “Chi è Che Dorme Insieme A Me” (a bold, uninhibited statement of sexual promiscuity), “Sovrapposizioni” (a sublime gypsy-circus fresco in Rota/Fellini style), “I Due Cavallini” (a Piero classic: the game of horses as a metaphor for love), “Esisto Anch'io” (a virtuosic, semi-improvised vocal-lyric collage at times worthy of a Mina). An overlooked and priceless gem of Italian pop. A stunning, informal (self-)portrait of the female condition, of emotional and sexual emancipation, at the dawn of what would become, by definition, the decade of the greatest advances in women's rights.

Andare, camminare, lavorare…

Ever more marginal and marginalised, in 1974 Ciampi allows himself the luxury of flushing away his last chance to turn things around: Ornella Vanoni, impressed by his performances, asks Marchetti to produce her a record with the best of Piero's repertoire; but Ciampi is nowhere to be found (sometimes, mysteriously, he managed to vanish without a trace), Marchetti is at his wit's end, stalls for time, chases down every lead that might lead to him - nothing. Ecce Homo: the project falls through. In 1975 Rca releases Andare, Camminare, Lavorare e Altri Discorsi, a (partial) summa of significant tracks drawn from previous works plus two new songs, themselves more than up to the task: “Andare, Camminare, Lavorare”, a sort of galloping funky-cabaret number on the “performance principle”, to quote Marcuse, a surreal, slacker satire of little Italy's referendums, austerity and the Years of Lead, and “Cristo Fra I Chitarristi”, a spare track, just guitar and voice in Brassens style, a parable that mockingly likens the ordeal of a failed musician to that of the Redeemer.

To this day it's probably his best-known record.

A few months later, what would in fact be his last studio effort was released as a double LP: Piero Ciampi Dentro e Fuori. A notable farewell, though musically a bit more repetitive and subdued compared to his recent past, particularly inspired in its lyrics, perhaps never so fluent and narrative, as if he sensed he had so many, too many things to say (even at the risk of being verbose) and too little time to be heard. His prediction, for once, would prove exact. “Canto Di Una Suora”, with its western touches (harmonica, guitar, strings) and its depiction of a religiosity that is at once secular, monastic and libertarian, “Sul Porto Di Livorno” (already featured on Nada's record), “Raptus”, musically one of the finest pieces Marchetti ever orchestrated: a sort of Maremma murder ballad with a languid, soundtrack-style jazz verse somewhere between “Erotika '70” and the like, and inspired funk-rock shifts straight out of Italian crime-film scores, and “Cara”, with the lovely mellotron flourish in its instrumental theme, are by far the finest pieces of a craftsmanship whose average quality was nonetheless high.

Elsewhere, worth noting are the Sixties-style decadence of “L'Incontro” and “Disse, Non Dio, Decido Io”, the bossa-jazz of “Uffa Che Noia” (“life is a classroom where boredom is the teacher”, as Celine might have agreed), the unexpected bursts of provincial Seventies rock in “Va” (this passage is memorable: “Io tra milioni di sguardi che s’inseguono in terra/ ho scelto proprio il tuo/ ed ora tra miliardi di vite/ mi divido con te”), the merciless self-analysis of “L'Assenza è Un Assedio”: “Una vita a precipizio/ l’esistenza senza un senso/ la discesa senza ritorno/ poi la salita viene crudele”, and the swinging divertissement with Trio Lescano-style choirs of a track in which Ciampi finally comes face to face with the mask of the quintessential loser: “Don Chisciotte”.

Until the very last minute

After this effort, the most tragic comedian ever to tread the Italian stage would gradually exit behind the dimming footlights, toward the night awaiting him.

Of the last years of his life, while a faint, somewhat halting trickle of cult recognition and esteem began to build, what's remembered above all are a few worldly episodes, at once sublime and folkloric, like the brawl in Rome with “Il Califfo” (who, unforgivably, had apparently invited him to his nightclub but forgot to buy him a drink), the concerts left half-finished (or barely begun, like the one “delle cinquecentomila lire”), and his appearance, unsteady on stage and visibly drunk, at the 1976 Tenco festival, where a clash with the impatient audience dissolves, by the end of the song, into applause and mutual emotion.

Death on credit: Piero Ciampi died in Rome on 19 January 1980, not of cirrhosis, as he had carefully arranged, but of cancer, and the doctor who attended him “until the very last minute” was, ironically enough, himself a singer-songwriter: Mimmo Locasciulli.

On that note, the most significant posthumous event is the 1990 release (on triple LP or double CD) of the Rca edition titled L'Album di Piero Ciampi (or simply “Piero Ciampi”), a collection that, besides offering an impeccable summary of the brilliant Livorno artist's career, also serves up the treat of six unreleased tracks that will delight both devotees and newcomers alike.

Songs that, if anything, reveal an even more unhinged and fascinating side of the singer-songwriter: “Adius” starts out as a variation on the theme of “L’Assenza È Un Assedio” only to derail into a liberating, brass-band carnival (“Ma Vaffanculo! Sono quarant’anni che ti amo, ma vaffanculo!”, obviously unthinkable for its time); even bolder, more futuristic and eccentric than any genre or style ever christened in Italy, though, are “Non C’è Più L’America” (a slam poetry piece packed with memorable lines and literary references), “Hitler In Galera” (pure theatre of the absurd about the dictator's final, imagined days) and “Dario di Livorno” (the true story of a boy arrested over a harmless prank and locked up in an asylum, told as a stomp-blues) — lopsided and alien tracks, somewhere between the acid, iridescent freak-folk of the 1960s, a drunken stornello, and lo-fi before the term even existed.

The generous double album We're in troubled waters (2024) contains eleven more unreleased tracks and twenty-one alternate versions, along with a hefty booklet.

Piero's war never ends: because “you don't fight with weapons but with the heart.” Even from the great beyond.

Special thanks to Enrico Venturi (www.bielle.org) and Gisela Scerman (www.gisy.it)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google