His free song

Few successful artists like Lucio Battisti have managed to stay as free and independent in the face of the market's temptations (and other pressures) throughout their careers. For the singer-songwriter from Poggio Bustone, “Il mio canto libero” wasn't just a hit chorus, but a way of life. Even at the cost of some spectacular refusals. One has gone down in history: in 1973, he said no to the most powerful man in Italy.

That year, in fact, Gianni Agnelli had instructed his people to contact Lucio Battisti to persuade him to hold a concert at Turin's Teatro Regio, sponsored by the Turin-based company. The offer was colossal: a billion lire, perhaps two, according to some rumors. A check that would have swayed anyone else, but not Lucio. The calls piled up, but none was ever answered. “We can get through to Brezhnev in thirty seconds, but we can't get through to Lucio Battisti,” the Avvocato snapped, frustrated and baffled.

Up in Fiat's top offices, an awkward chill settled in, until Battisti's final no arrived.

And yet, the timing could hardly have been more fitting. Just a year earlier, “Il mio canto libero” had been the best-selling album in Italy, and Battisti was living the peak of his success: the collaborations with Mina, the TV appearances, his consecration as a popular idol. But that overwhelming wave also carried with it the fallout of a morbidly intrusive press. In 1973, the birth of his son Luca Filippo Carlo had exposed the family to the merciless curiosity of the tabloids: photographers camped outside the clinic, insinuations of secret affairs with actresses like Zeudi Araya, venomous articles painting him as “stingy, apathetic, surly.”

Battisti, hurt and unable to bear it any longer, reacted with a gesture that would mark his career forever: he withdrew into silence, deciding to cut ties with interviews, TV appearances, concerts. Even a model of restraint and rigor like Enzo Biagi found himself politely turned down.

The paradox was plain to see: here was an artist earning up to 4 billion lire a year in royalties, yet the lure of easy paydays left him utterly indifferent. Wealth, for him, had never been the goal. He lived a reserved, spartan life, far from the spotlight, together with his wife Grazia Letizia Veronese. In Lecco, where he spent his days away from the cameras, he would answer with irony anyone who stopped him on the street: “I wish I were Battisti, with what he earns!” So his refusal to Agnelli wasn't just the pride of an inscrutable artist, but a life choice that would define the Lazio-born singer-songwriter for the rest of his life, cut tragically short by illness on 9 September 1998.

From that moment on, Lucio Battisti, just thirty-three years old, gradually withdrew from the spotlight until his definitive farewell to Italian television, with his very last appearance granted only to a Swiss broadcaster in 1980.

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17/02/2026