GIOVANNI LINDO FERRETTI - Percuotendo in cadenza

Back from such an immense effort,
confused and tired
of too many things already tiresome
and others that evade the reckoning,
I stop, to gaze back at the road and all around.
(Reduce, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, 2006)

It was February 2024, we were at the Astra Kulturhaus in Berlin and we couldn't believe it. There really was Ferretti, chanting through every possible state of agitation alongside the reawakened CCCP. Zamboni true to the line, Annarella unyielding, Fatur a grotesque bonze sanctified by metropolitan corruption. On the bathroom door someone had scrawled "Ferretti, you're out of fodder." We were hurling abuse at Scanzi and demanding a five-year plan and some stability back.

Just a few months later, in late spring, we found him alone at the Olimpico in Vicenza, carved into that narrow, dizzyingly tall neoclassical space, sculpted in golden stone alongside the frescoed perspectives, fleeing among the Palladian pillars. In a piece of theatre-song titled "Moltitudini in cadenza, percuotendo," he, stern as a hieratic Savonarola, brought his beloved horse's skull onto the stage and spoke softly. At his side, the only other presence was Simone Beneventi, immersed in his jumble of percussion, making the sonic backdrop tremble like a distant storm.
Today the pattern repeats. This time it was CSI who woke up, and once the magnificent run of concerts was over, he returned to his own show, refined over these two years with the addition of Luca Alfonso Rossi on stringed instruments and renamed "Percuotendo in cadenza," of which this album is the document.

It seems then that Ferretti Lindo Giovanni, now on the threshold of seventy-three, needs to bring clarity, to reconcile his old and new experiences, line them up, put them in order, reread them through his own determinism; to turn them into stations of a coherent spiritual journey that, in his own cosmogony, must end at Cerreto, where he lives in "other people's houses," in his hermitage of silence, solitude and prayer. It was inevitable that this fragile man, the idol scorched by that cavernous, trembling, shameless voice, would eventually return to his own songs and bend them toward this twilight light. Votive icons, marking the moments of an existence entirely bent on return, toward that broad, steep ridge from which one can watch multitudes of ghosts, of men and horses, descending into the valley, dragged down by the weight of History. A danse macabre he senses he will soon join.
The songs are pared back to a medieval, monastic harshness, exposed in their most eschatological dimension. A vesper of melancholy and gratitude that follows the method of the beautiful "Bella gente d'Appennino – di madri e di famiglie." Much of CSI returns here as a moving bucolic song, rural and ethnic poetry full of popular, Pasolinian wonder. "Finisterrae" and "Brace," "Inquieto" and "Intimisto," "Del Mondo," smell of shifted earth and move slowly through a complicated tale "of things, not of thoughts," as Chiron would put it in "Medea."

The spoken-word pieces are the usual turbulent prose compositions built on the edge of cut-up, reconstructing semantic labyrinths, unraveling feelings and infusing events with a certain spiritual roundness. Songs from the end of the world, from an age of walls crumbling under the weight of time, of a modernity that happens and sweeps everyone away with it. So the PGR songs become statements of old age, with "Cronaca Montana" as their chief interpreter, moving in its endless Apennine vistas, held up by nothing more than a crystal-clear guitar arpeggio and a beat from a toy piano's preset. Even the two pieces fished out of "CO.DEX," their contrived hip-hop/world flavor of the 2000s smoothed over, manage not to break the spell, but to take part in it with real significance.
To please Sister Aurelia Strozzi, who back in the days of the Zecchino d'Oro predicted "worst case, we'll make him a singer," the show closes with the long "Te Deum," remixed with priestly recitatives, fire-and-brimstone sermons and Counter-Reformation Latinisms.

In the end you can say anything and its opposite about Ferretti: you can credit him with an unshakeable consistency (as Giorgio Canali has always maintained), accuse him of having betrayed us all, or brand him as the biggest smooth-talking charlatan in Italian singer-songwriter music. Fair enough, but setting aside a few slight uncertainties in the overall execution, what we're left with are songs that, however you look at them, manage to capture existence in every one of its forms, whether a rebellious youth or a weary old age, whether one wants to flee or return, whether one must live or die; they are unmistakably our mirror, whatever it is they reflect. And so...

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11/10/2026