The verse under fire

Censorship, in the Sixties, spared not even the finest pens of Italian song. Caught up in it was also – perhaps inevitably, given the bluntness of his lyrics – Fabrizio De André. And it happened in one of his most famous invectives against the hypocrisy of the self-righteous: "La città vecchia".

The song, written by the Genoese singer-songwriter together with Elvio Monti, was first released as a 45 rpm single in December 1965 (with "Delitto di paese" on the B-side) and included the following year on the album "Tutto Fabrizio De André".

Built on a mazurka-like melody, "La città vecchia" recounts fragments of life as it unfolds in the seediest quarters of Genoa's harbor, through a lucid, sharp-witted narrative built piece by piece. What emerges is a sequence of characters populating the alleyways: the prostitutes, the "four half-poisoned pensioners at their table", thieves, murderers, right down to the "strange fellow" who sold his mother for three thousand lire. A human catalogue reflecting Fabrizio De André's constant attention to those living on the margins, distilled in the famous closing line ("Se non sono gigli son pur sempre figli, vittime di questo mondo").

The censor's axe, however, fell mercilessly on one of the song's best-known verses, the one about the old professor who scorns prostitutes by day but goes looking for them among the caruggi by night. The original lines read: "Quella che di giorno chiami con disprezzo specie di tr*ia/ quella che di notte stabilisce il prezzo della tua gioia". Below you can listen to that very first version.

The phrase was deemed too vulgar, and so Fabrizio De André was forced to permanently replace those lines with "quella che di giorno chiami con disprezzo pubblica moglie/ quella che di notte stabilisce il prezzo alle tue voglie".

The lyrics were altered for every version of the song, including the later studio and live recordings, even though a first version containing the offending line was actually recorded — only to be withdrawn by the record label Karim itself due to the censorship intervention: lucky are the very few who own the extremely rare printed copies. Below is the censored, definitive version of the track.

"La città vecchia" is undoubtedly one of the young De André's early triumphs, one that naturally bears the mark of his infatuation with poetry and French chanson. The incipit, in fact, is lifted directly from a poem by Jacques Prévert, "Embrasse-moi", which had been set to music by Wal-Berg and sung by Marianne Oswald in 1935 ("Le soleil du bon Dieu ne brill'pas de notr' côté Il a bien trop à faire dans les riches quartiers". "The good Lord's sun doesn't shine on our side, it already has too much to do in the rich neighborhoods"), while the music, composed by Elvio Monti, is heavily modeled on Georges Brassens's "Le bistrot" (1960).

But the main influence is Umberto Saba's "Canzoniere": it's no coincidence that, for both the title and the content of the song, De André drew on the identically titled poem by the Trieste-born author, included in that very collection. Umberto Saba's poem "Città vecchia" offers a profound look at everyday life in Trieste's oldest quarter, highlighting the humanity of the people who inhabit it and reflecting on the bond between humility and spirituality. Saba describes the back alleys of his city and the poor, marginalized figures who crowd them, firmly criticizing the bourgeois model of life. But although the characters are more or less the same ("the prostitute and the sailor, the old man who curses, the woman who quarrels [...] are all creatures of life and of sorrow", Saba writes), the poet stresses that he has something in common with these figures, namely belief in the same God ("the Lord stirs within them, as within me"). De André counters this vision with a more secular, disenchanted outlook: "Nei quartieri dove il sole del buon Dio non dà i suoi raggi". Yet what remains is the same sense of solidarity with that disinherited humanity and the firm condemnation of the hypocrisy of the self-righteous and respectable, summed up in the closing lines: "Se tu penserai, se giudicherai, da buon borghese, li condannerai a cinquemila anni più le spese, ma se capirai, se li cercherai fino in fondo, se non sono gigli, son pur sempre figli, vittime di questo mondo".

Paradoxically, though, "La città vecchia" would end up having to reckon with the very same self-righteous hypocrisy it had pilloried.

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09/04/2026