The cover of Roberto Vecchioni’s latest book in which, through a series of letters, he tells an imaginary grandfather significant episodes of his life
Roberto Vecchioni is an artist of the word. Sung, written, meditated. He taught Latin and Greek from 1969 to 2004 in various classical high schools in Lombardy. In his career, at 80 years old, he is experiencing a new youth.
May 10th was from Pope francesco together with several artists, Nobel Prize winners and scientists for the World Meeting on Human Fraternity organized by the Vatican Foundation “Fratelli tutti”.
July 17 The song Dream, boy, dreamwhich he performed in a duet with the young Genoese rapper Alfa at the last Sanremo Festival, was awarded a Gold Record.
He has written about fifteen books including collections of short stories, anthologies of verses, essays and novels. The last one, Between silence and thunder (Einaudi), is a particular collection of letters where a boy writes several letters to a grandfather who, however, never responds.
Vecchioni, why this silence?
“It’s the originality of the book. Someone who answers is very normal and all the letters are a dialogue. I split myself in two because this has always been a feeling of mine. On one hand, I feel the strength of going, of adventure, of risk, of fighting, of becoming, to quote Heraclitus; on the other, the strength of being Platonic, that is, of staying still, of thinking, of not moving physically but inside my memory and my head. This split creates problems. On stage, for example, I am very expressive, extroverted, I say everything. In normal life I change completely, I become a creature of habit, I don’t have that spark that the artist has on stage”. Two lives that intertwine and duel. “It’s no coincidence that the letters are of two types. There is the story of physical life as it happens, written in Verga’s style, without leaps of fancy. And then there is the other life: that of reflection, written with the consciousness of myself that naturally does not respond because it knows the things that have happened to it. Sometimes I climb very strange roads, other times instead I write farcical things, I talk about Schubert and the Highway Code.
What kind of grandfather are you?
“Deeply in love with all four of my nieces: Nina, Cloe, Amelia and Adelaide. When I’m with them I feel much younger, smarter and more active. I feel that there is a transmission of something that is what human existence is based on. I am not capable of teaching them how to cook or ride a bike, but I transmit to them how to dream, how to understand what has happened and, above all, how to try to distinguish good from evil. I hope that they too, when the time comes, can transmit these things to their children because without this passing of the baton the world ends.”
How do you see today’s kids: fragile or just misunderstood?
“Both. It goes from confused and angry trappers with the world to those who know how to use words to denounce the lack they feel and the need for a different world. There are those who tell love stories that sometimes don’t get me so much because I am a man of the twentieth century, old-fashioned and for me, as Euripides said, you don’t really love if you don’t love forever and I feel love like this. I see boys who touch each other, they smell each other but sometimes they lose the feeling. They are aware of the body but not of the spiritual moment of love. Others have a generational uncertainty because they basically can’t understand all the stupid things their fathers and grandfathers do.”
Wasn’t it like this in the past too?
“Yes, age has always determined the power of hope. Up to the age of 25, you see the world around you as ugly and horrible and imagine a much better one. From 30, you adapt to reality, which is an obligatory step, and so you compromise on many things. Then there are the more spiritual kids, who have understood the world and understood that life is a transitory moment that must be loved and used well because we are not a meteor in the universe but there is a plan that goes beyond and so they have the strength to overcome even pain, anger, to prolong hope up to 60 years old.”
Roberto Vecchioni, 80, with rapper Alfa, 23, during the last Sanremo Festival (Ansa)
What does the word fraternity mean, around which you and other artists have been called by Pope Francis?
“It is the foundation for which men were created. Today the sense of brotherhood is inversely proportional to the sense of survival. The problem is that if I have to choose between myself and the other, I choose myself. Unfortunately, life today forces us to have involuntary enemies. Conflict leads us to give up certain analyses and broader constructions, to understand beauty, art, the harmony of music or poetry. All things that must be understood little by little and by dedicating time to them and if this is missing you lose the foundation of your existence which is to charge yourself with emotions that save your life.”
Did the Pope’s invitation surprise you?
«Very much. I don’t know how he came up with the idea of calling me (laughs, ed.). It is one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in my life, not only because of the opportunity to say something about brotherhood but also because speaking before the Pontiff is like doing it before all of humanity put together.”
In November he had participated in a meeting with Cardinal Ravasi in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“A dear friend of mine to whom I also wrote a letter in the book. Every time I go to the Vatican it is a special emotion because it seems like another country, or rather it seems like a country outside the country, a world that is in the clouds, but knows very well the things that happen under the clouds.”
Is there an exact moment when you started believing in God?
“It’s been a long journey. When I was young, even though I attended Catholic schools, I felt that faith was a sort of oppression of my freedom. Then everything changed, I compared myself with others, believers and non-believers, intellectuals, artists, thinkers, and I understood that you can’t be satisfied with what you see, touch and feel, I understood that we are not created to waste a life waking up in the morning, going to work and coming home at night to sleep. It’s an existential absurdity. So there must be something else, or Someone, for whom we do all this.”
What?
“Those who have much more faith than me are convinced that each of us has a small mission to accomplish on behalf of God.”
What is yours?
“To be able to give people hope, peace and also emotions. And help them reflect.”
In the book he also writes a letter to Staino telling him: “When you are before God, sing to him Lights at San Siro as you know how to do and you’ll see that he will understand”. Why this song in particular?
«Because it’s the first soul song I wrote and because it’s the only one he knew how to sing, putting all his strength into it. Lights at San Siror it is the song of the misery of man, of those who let themselves be taken by compromises and lose love, that is, the worst thing that can happen. It is not an easy song, everyone takes it only as the memory of a lost love but above all it is the story of those who go forward in life and lose more and more of themselves. A nightmare».
Roberto Vecchioni with his wife Daria Colombo in a photo from 2016 (Ansa)
In an interview he said that the mistakes we make are always about affections, never about things. What does that mean?
«In the past I didn’t think about others but only about myself, an attitude common to many artists. If I had to choose between going to a concert or being close to my wife who had a fever, I chose to go to the concert and this also happened for my children and I can’t say that I raised them. My wife, who is an exceptional woman, did much more than me. I didn’t have a sense of guilt, it came to me along the way, little by little. I admit, I suffered from egocentrism, I needed to be applauded to have a bit of serenity. I neglected many friends for my career. I almost always lived for myself, then fortunately all this cracked».
How did you deal with the death of your son Arrigo (who tragically passed away in April 2023, ed.)?
“For my wife it’s like the first evening, when we received the phone call. It’s as if time had stopped. She hasn’t changed, she’s physically wasted away, she even developed a heart problem that she’s treating. She lives in a fog in the sense that, if she could, she would always cry to let off steam. She doesn’t want to talk anymore, she’s closed herself off. She has an immense affection from her children, grandchildren, friends around her, but it’s not enough because this is a dialogue between her and her son that I, even if I wanted to, can’t enter into. Because a mother is divided in half between herself and the son she has given birth to.”
And how did she react?
“I am “alone”, let’s say, a desperate man but I don’t have that existential sadness that gripped my wife. And sometimes, like a sudden flash, I intuit why it happened.” What was his answer? “Arrigo couldn’t go on like this anymore, it’s as if the Lord had told him: “Come on, enough, come here with me, you can’t live like this anymore.” In the last period he was very ill. He was a brave boy, he tried everything to get out of the painful situation to which the disease nailed him. He tried a thousand jobs, even the most humble, he wrote down the things he had to do but he couldn’t do it. He tried to smile, to go away with his thoughts, I don’t know, thinking about football or poetry, because he was a great poet, he wrote beautiful verses but he couldn’t resist the test of reality, of materiality and this led him to decide after seventeen years that he could no longer be with the world.”
Petrarca wrote that “by singing the pain is lessened,” the “pain becomes less bitter.” Does your job help you overcome this pain?
“I am privileged because singing in public helps me to throw out all the waste, the disappointments, the good and the bad, it is like a secular confession that in the end gives me the strange sensation of having freed myself from a burden and makes me feel freer and lighter. Having the possibility of sharing with the public the songs written and sung by me means not only looking you in the face and reflecting yourself in the pain and joy you have had but also feeling that many people are going through the same experiences. Here there is a very strong sense of brotherhood because we are made brothers by these feelings, not because we have the same car or take the same train. Because, perhaps, we are moved in front of a head by Michelangelo or a painting by Van Gogh. There must be a reason if we remain there hypnotized in front of a work of art to admire it instead of leaving immediately. If the world were all matter, that work would also be only matter and instead we sense that inside there is something higher”.
How do you imagine the afterlife?
“It’s not a place but another way of feeling the world. It’s probably a still existence in which everything is in a state of quiet that paradoxically causes a frenzy of happiness that you couldn’t get in any other way. More or less like a very powerful drug that, however, doesn’t do any harm.”