The news of Ornella Vanoni’s passing is not a simple news announcement. For the people of believers in music, his is not a death, but a transfiguration: the definitive entry of an Archetype into the eternity of culture. Crying would be a misunderstanding of his message. As he taught us in one of his most revealing songs – not the most famous, but perhaps the most profound – his essence was precisely the coexistence of opposites: a smile inside the tears. And today, our tears at his passing cannot help but contain a grateful smile for the heritage of humanity that he gave us. His entire work was a “framing” of the most troubled emotions, the most uncomfortable stories, giving them the dignity of an icon. He took an eternal portrait of the human soul, with all its imperfections.
He never hid his cracks. His charisma was not made of unattainable perfection, but of ritual frankness. His off-the-line interviews, his cutting self-deprecation, were acts of a real man public exorcism against hypocrisy. Like deceiving deities, he has played with public expectations all his life, turning anxiety, depression and a turbulent love life into a emotional liturgy.
It is she, the “Soul that sings”, not a canonized saint, but one who found her way to salvation in the practice of singing. «Words on notes have been the best company / To face stupidity we still have joy», reads the lyrics. Cheerfulness is not carefree happiness, but the courageous strength of those who sing despite the pain, of those who find a “smile” right “inside the tears”. It is the same resilience that Vanoni embodied: the strength to transform every wound into a verse, every love ended in a psalm for broken hearts.
It is in this declaration – «I am all the love I have given, all the unconditional love» – that we find the core of his belief, a secular yet profoundly spiritual faith. This is not the promise of an immortal soul waiting for an otherworldly paradise. It is something more radical and earthly: it is the affirmation that our only, true resurrection lies in the trail of love we leave in the world.
Ornella Vanoni’s “faith”, as emerges from her work, was a faith in resilient resistance of the human against oblivion. He believed that the only way to defy death was not through prayer to a distant god, but through the courageous act of giving pieces of one’s soul – one’s emotions, one’s frailties, one’s unconditional love – to the listener. That love, once given, ceased to be his personal possession to become a common good, a eternal emotional heritage.
His physical death, therefore, is not the end of this existencebut the moment in which his “I Am” – that is, the sum total of all the love he sang and embodied – definitively detaches himself from his person to become pure legacy, pure energy available to anyone with a heart to listen. His resurrection occurs every time one of his songs ignites an emotion, consoles a pain or simply makes someone feel less alone. It is a belief in life after the death of the ego, but not of the relationship.
Through the lens of Pop-Theology, we see into her the last priestess of a cult more necessary than ever for everyone: the cult of emotional truth. His “smile inside the tears” is not a simple metaphor, but a dogma of hope for a fragile humanity: a hymn to the resilience of the human who, dying as an individual, is eternally reborn as an echo of love. For the rest, as for his true destiny, now, after his death, Christians are educated to “hope for everyone” (H. urs von Balthasar). We therefore also hope for Ornella, so that she can marvel at the paternal beauty of the agape God in the paradise of Light and peace of Jesus, the “just judge in his great mercy”.
Photo Ansa
