What angel will Lucio Dalla be?
March 1, 2012 just 3 days after his 69th birthday struck down by an illness while in Montreux, for a concert, Lucio Dalla dies. The purpose seen a few days earlier on the podium to direct theRAI orchestra at the 62nd Sanremo Festival with the song Sung “Nanì” by Pierdavide Carone who will eventually finish fifth. The news comes like a punch in the stomach and is one that takes your breath away. Some songs of him heard thousands of times before, now they assume different meanings, it seems to contain other messages and the mind returns to one in particular. Year 1986 the album is “Lies”among the songs that compose it from the title “If I were an angel” where Lucio imagines himself in the role of a guardian angel Definitely different from all away from the processions and from the boxes of the cribs, but smoking Marlboros in short, definitely different from how we have always imagined guardian angels. Knowing the physicality and irony that was typical of Lucio, the beginning of the song, however, makes one think precisely of him. “Tall blond, invisible, how beautiful I would be”.
The angel Lucio would really be like coming to himself in the song, spiteful and disrespectful it would fly around but in places where suffering is the life partner of many there‘Afghanistan, South Africa, then to talk to America and if they don’t break it down with them too Russians would have a chat. We said spiteful, sure but towards the shady trades, missile factories, to come? But doing it all by peeing without neglecting the dollars that come with it. Lucio would not be one from Crechebut his place would be among men because it is there that he imagined the angels, “they are the most poor and more alone….those caught between the nets“. But a good Angel would come to talk to God asking why you forgive the powerful and rascals, concluding that then he is also wrong …..
Concluding that if among men God is still born, he would be obedient, but in his own way also at the risk of being thrown into hell turned into a devil … which frankly he would not like a genius. Now Lucio really is among the angels, I sincerely believe that it will really be as he described himself in the song, arrogant, spitefulbut fair and always ready to take sides on the side of the weakest … but….and the good Lord how he will take it towards this gypsy angel? Well here we borrow an image of Guareschi, thinking that as the crucifix of Don Camillo he will shake his head letting out a smile and thinking that deep down Lucio is like that and that perhaps it is also his beauty …..
We miss you Lucio, for 10 years!