Carmen Colon

His partnership with poet Roberto Roversi was a decisive collaboration in the artistic growth of Lucio Dalla. As a musician first and foremost, but also as a (future) lyricist. "If I hadn't met Roversi, I'd be a plumber now," the Bolognese singer-songwriter would joke in an interview given two years before his death. Together, they created a memorable trilogy that revolutionized Italian song, dismantling the traditional verse-chorus formula and replacing it with a distinctive flow of music and poetry, undoubtedly experimental but never pretentious or self-indulgent.

Roversi was a godsend for Dalla, who, ever since the days of "Lucio dove vai" (1967), had lived with a kind of split between his true self and his public image. Not content with success, the Bolognese singer-songwriter was searching for a "third way" for Italian song: a middle ground between the ideological singer-songwriter tradition of Pietrangeli, Guccini and Lolli and pop music. His ambition drove him to tell direct, raw and disarming stories, capable of tearing open society, exposing the arrogance and contradictions of power. Roversi managed to indulge this aspiration by marrying realism with poetry. At times with unprecedented harshness, as in the case of this cult song from the second chapter of the trilogy, "Anidride solforosa" (1975). An album that, incidentally, was originally meant to be titled "L'anno è un fuoco", to depict "the unstoppable violence of this age", in Roversi's own words. A violence that, in this specific case, spares not even the smallest and most defenseless.

Roversi often drew inspiration from news stories for his poems. In this instance, he had been struck by the terrible 1971 Churchville case, which involved a 10-year-old girl: Carmen Colon was abducted on November 16 in the city of Rochester, New York; she was found dead two days later near Churchville, six kilometers away. It was the first of three murders committed by the man who came to be known as the Alphabet Killer: all three young victims, in fact, had first names whose initial matched that of their surname. Two years after Carmen Colon, it was the turn of eleven-year-old Wanda Walkowicz, and then eleven-year-old Michelle Maenza. Moreover, the killer made sure the girls' bodies were found in locations whose names also began with the same letter as their first and last names: Carmen Colon in Churchville on November 18, 1971, Wanda Walkowicz in Webster on April 3, 1973, and Michelle Maenza on November 28, 1973, in Macedon.

The Alphabet Killer was never found. The FBI questioned more than a hundred people, but only a few seemed to have any real knowledge of the events. Among them was an individual, never publicly identified, referred to at the time as a "person of interest": he took his own life six weeks after the last murder. His name was only removed from the list of suspects in 2007, when DNA testing ruled out any involvement on his part. In Carmen Colon's case, the only suspect was the victim's uncle, but the scant traces left by the killer made it impossible to establish his guilt, as was also the case with the other main suspect. That man took his own life in 1991.

The song is a harrowing reconstruction of Carmen Colon's ordeal, but also a scathing rebuke of a society indifferent to protecting and safeguarding its most vulnerable. The smooth country musicality of the arrangement and Dalla's intense vibrato accompany the harrowing description of the girl's final moments, with the hammering anaphora "Carmen Colon" repeated obsessively, conveying the full weight of pain caused by such an early and violent death. Roversi imagines the little gypsy girl abandoned like discarded trash on the roadside (her body was found in a canal near Interstate 490), ignored by the cars speeding toward the sea, only to later be exploited by the media to stir up a wave of collective outrage:

Oh Carmen Colon

questa ragazzina e la morte

commuovono la tivù.

Grandi i titoli sopra i giornali

Carmen Colon

è la vittima ventesima

fra i bidoni viola dell'agosto

her body hidden beneath a sheet

Carmen Colon

no one stopped for her

nor did they lend a hand or help

filavano via verso il mare

"Carmen Colon" was certainly not a hit, but it struck at the heart of every fan of the Bolognese singer-songwriter. It didn't go unnoticed by law enforcement either. Roversi was even summoned to Rome by Interpol for questioning about the case, since some details in the lyrics' descriptions were said to have been withheld from the public by investigators. But the poet solved the mystery by showing the investigators the newspaper clippings on which he had based the lyrics.

The partnership between Dalla and Roversi came to an end – not without some lingering friction – after the third chapter of the trilogy, "Automobili". Clashes and reconciliations would follow. Until the hatchet was finally buried for good. "What drew me to Lucio Dalla, more than his human and artistic restlessness, was his impatience with normal standards," Roversi would admit in 2007. "Dalla is a man, as well as an artist and a singer, always one step ahead of his own body. He tramples on his own shadow, which lies in front of him rather than behind, and is therefore a miraculous experimenter." "I learned everything from Roversi," Lucio would later admit in turn, "how to write my own words, but above all else, pure emotion."

It was right after that historic trilogy that Dalla created three consecutive masterpieces ("How Deep Is the Sea", "Lucio Dalla", "Dalla"), interspersed with the historic "Banana Republic" tour alongside Francesco De Gregori, cementing his status as one of the greatest Italian singer-songwriters of all time. Yet he would never again sing a song as harsh and harrowing as "Carmen Colon" - a song that, on every listen, cannot fail to send chills down the spine and stir deep emotion.

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26/02/2026