From Festival of Sanremo since 2008 many things have changed, in Italy, in the world, and in particular in the writer. I enthusiastically accepted the proposal of my manager at the time, Adriano Aragozzini, to participate in the festival, with the somewhat naive and perhaps a little arrogant idea of making visible what animated my very personal inner life. Veltroni founded the PD drawing on a broadly beat heritage. As the Bush era waned, a young Illinois senator who would soon become the first African-American president of the United States of America seemed to revive the promises of the 60s. Naturally it was an illusion, a fantastic world, but the dream with which I presented myself in Sanremo corresponded exactly to the one that had nourished my imagination for so many years.
In my eyes, the Sanremo Festival inevitably took on the contours of a rock happening from the decade of flowers. The song I presented was called Novecento, a series of quick frames from our country's recent past and which I judged (and continue to judge) as founding: the Resistance, the worker and student movement, national unity against terrorism, the death of Berlinguer, that of Moro, the murder of Guido Rossa. I defined it as an ideal biography of mine, because the time of civil conscience far exceeds the personal one. I went to Sanremo with the firm intention not to be an accomplice of the ephemeral, not to make premeditated art, as Shelley said.
Looking reality in the eye usually drops any kind of romantic pretense. The ideal breath that animated my song was soon subordinated to the solution of far more concrete problems such as the position of the microphones, the management of the camera, the image consultants, the journalists, the interviews, my formulaic and standardized answers. I went on stage at the Ariston with a certain bravado, an attitude typical of the unwary, but also with the disillusionment of someone who has just seen a very long-lasting dream fade. So after some attempts to promote the album, a concert in Padua, some in Rome, a rich and exciting season gradually came to an end.
I resumed my humanistic philology studies more seriously, which has now become my profession. I haven't abandoned music and writing altogether, but have devoted them to greater intimacy, to a smaller audience, to a humbler dream. The 2008 Sanremo Festival was one of the most important and most formative experiences of my life. After the limelight, a very long adolescence somehow gave way to adulthood.
