Gianni Morandi shows his right hand, where the signs of deep burns are clearly visible. «See that little hill over there? I went there to burn some brush. I tripped and suddenly found myself on the ground, among the burning embers. I don’t know how, but while I was trying to protect my face with one hand, I grabbed a branch with the other. It was on fire, but I still managed to get up. It took me more than half an hour to get home, so everything was burnt. It was really bad, but I’m alive.”
Two years after that accident, in the spring of 2023, Morandi with his dazzling smile from the cover of Famiglia Cristiana inaugurated the new look of our newspaper. Another three years have passed and we meet again together with other colleagues from the press, this time directly at his home, a villa nestled in the Bolognese hills among pine trees and olive groves.
Gianni Morandi with the journalists invited to his home to present the new tour
The occasion is the launch of his new tour which starts on April 15th (all the dates here) accompanied by a captivating new single, Monghidorowritten by his friend Jovanottiwhich takes its name from the village which is located about forty kilometers from here and where the singer was born and raised. And it is Lorenzo Cherubini himself who pops out to say hello from Gianni’s cell phone.
A short phone call, because, explains Morandi, «Lorenzo has to go for physiotherapy». Necessary care after the serious bike accident three years ago, to recover as best as possible also in view of the new tour. Concerts that his friend Gianni will also give, around the sports halls of Italy until the end of May, and which are already sold out almost everywhere. But this day is very far from the promotional liturgies of normal meetings with the press. We had the opportunity to chat with him and his wife Anna Dan as if we were friends guests at their place for lunch. Anna, in particular, lit up when we noticed, written in pen on a wall, a sequence of dates, accompanied by numbers: «These are the heights of our son Pietro. When he was a child he feared remaining small. And so we wrote his height on this wall: we started in 2009, when he was 12 years old, and we continued until 2020. Two years ago the flood came here and we had to whitewash everything. But we left this wall as it was.”
That child now, with the name of Thirteen Pietrohas become a very good rapper who debuted in Sanremo this year. “He writes beautiful lyrics,” his mother says proudly. And what does your father, with whom you duetted at the Festival on the notes of Vita, recorded by him with Lucio Dalla, say? “I repeat what he told me: ‘Dad, come. I don’t care if they write once again that I’m recommended: it’s a gift I want to give myself.’ And then I went.”
The idea of a tour was born to celebrate the 60th anniversary of one of his historic hits, There was a boy who loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones like me. Gianni recently sang it on TV on Fabio Fazio’s program, accompanying himself on the guitar. At the end of the performance, he apologized to the other guitarist who was with him for a mistake he had made. An episode which he now explains like this: «I got a passage wrong because I was used to doing it in a higher key. I admitted it in front of everyone out of respect for the musician who was with me. And because Lucio Dalla taught me that every mistake can be transformed into a show. Once, during a concert, the lights went out. He then lit a candle, took his clarinet, took it apart and started playing with it. The audience went crazy. How many memories I have with him. The morning after the concerts, when I woke up I never found him: wherever we were, he liked to go early to visit churches and museums.”
That tour with Dalla in the late 1980s consecrated Morandi’s rebirth after a long dark period which was interrupted with a song which, Gianni confesses, still gives him shivers today when he sings it: One in a thousand. «The opening words, “If you are down, never crawl”, weigh like bricks. I was in my early thirties and no one called me anymore. One day I met a guitarist friend, Mario Gangi, who struck me: “If you don’t know what to do, go to the Conservatory and start studying music, because you don’t even know a note”, “Imagine if they take me, at my age!”, I replied. “Try the double bass course: there are few requests there”. I followed his advice, graduated in double bass and once even played Beethoven’s Fifth on the Isle of Man with 800 double bass players from all over the world. But, above all, at the Conservatory I learned to sing thanks to the choral singing teacher who was obsessed with Bach. And I learned to be a father to my first two children, Marco and Marianna, who I had previously neglected a little.”
After a lunch that couldn’t be more Emilian based on tortellini, cured meats of all types, trifle “that only in Bologna know how to do well” and coffee rigorously prepared with a mocha, there is still time to chat a bit. Gianni again shows his garden where he has created a circular track about a kilometer long where he goes running. Aside from that, I ask him what the secret to his fitness is. “Do as I do,” he replies. Then he kneels with his back straight against a wall: “You have to stay like that, as if you were sitting, for at least three minutes to keep your legs good.” I try, but after about twenty seconds I get up in pain. Instead he stays there. Okay, but who makes you still go around singing every night? «My model is Charles Aznavour. He died at 94 years old. And the next day he had a concert scheduled.”
