Francesco Guccini has died, a master of Italian song

Francesco Guccini has died. He was 86. With him goes one of the greatest figures of Italian singer-songwriter tradition, but also a writer, storyteller and intellectual who for over fifty years managed to interpret and narrate his country with a lucid, free and deeply personal gaze. Through songs that have become part of Italian music history, such as "Dio è morto", "La locomotiva", "L'avvelenata", "Canzone per un'amica", "Eskimo" and "Cyrano", Guccini turned songwriting into a tool for civic reflection, able to weave together memory, politics, history, provincial life and emotion.

After bidding farewell to the public and giving up recording, he found a new outlet in writing. Between 1989 and 2020 he published twenty-six books, many of them co-written with Loriano Macchiavelli. “I don't miss writing songs, because I write books. It's a different way of writing, but it's still writing,” he explained in 2018. Even when his eyesight problems made reading difficult, he never gave up on books: “I spend my days reading, or rather having things read to me,” he said, referring to the audiobooks that accompanied him daily.

Civic engagement remained a constant throughout his life and his work. Although he repeatedly described himself as a liberal-leaning anarchist, Guccini never hid his left-wing sympathies and continued, right up until his final years, to weigh in on public debate. In 2004 President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed him Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In one of his last interviews, given to Rolling Stone, he had bitterly expressed his judgment on the present state of singer-songwriter music, observing that “they've forgotten songs along the way”, before unequivocally restating his political stance: “Whoever says left and right are the same is usually on the right.”

His health, already fragile for some time, worsened on the evening of August 5th. The "Maestrone" passed away in his beloved Pàvana, surrounded by the love of his wife Raffaella, his daughter Teresa and his family. The family has announced that "in keeping with his wishes, the funeral will take place in the coming days in strictly private form" and has asked that "this moment of grief be experienced in the utmost privacy," thanking "everyone who will join in mourning him with affection, discretion and respect. To allow those who loved him to remember him and say goodbye, a memorial ceremony will be organized in September."

Francesco Guccini was born in Modena on 14 June 1940. A blunt, biting songwriter and author of lyrics of undisputed literary value, he made his debut in 1967 with "Folk beat n. 1" and released more than twenty albums over the course of his career. Alongside music, he devoted himself to writing, theatre, translation and other linguistic disciplines, also penning songs for other performers. His lyrics, often inspired by political, social and civic themes, have repeatedly been compared to contemporary poetry. He also taught Italian language at Dickinson College in Bologna and received numerous accolades, including four Targhe Tenco and two Premi Tenco.
His body of work maintained a fiercely "antagonistic" consistency across more than 60 years of Italian history, ranging from autobiographical reflections to political invectives. A world of verses and sounds, in which, between a glass of wine and a worn-out eskimo jacket, one found oneself travelling between the Via Emilia and the West.
Among his most memorable albums, we recall "Via Paolo Fabbri 43", to which we dedicated a milestone feature, "Elisir", "Radici", "Amerigo", "Metropolis", right up to the recent diptych "Songs to Cry Into Your Drink"-"Tavern Songs", which had relaunched his unmistakable style into the new millennium.

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