Canzoni d’amore

The music we listen to is revealing of the times we are going through: the fascinating journey through the history of our country in which Luca Beatrice leads us starts from this suggestive theory. A song for each year, or almost, from the 1960s to the present, to construct a history of the sentimental life of Italians. As society changes, economic balances, values and conventions change, so does the way love stories are lived and told: from the years of the economic boom, in which clandestine relationships such as those evoked in “Cielo in una stanza” are often concealed behind model families, to the 1970s, in which Guccini recounts with “Eskimo” a new relationship between couples, transformed by the sexual revolution, passing through the female loneliness staged in Ornella Vanoni’s “Appuntamento” and the love between teenagers recounted by Mogol and Battisti in “Canzone del sole.” In the 1980s Luca Carboni sings about the 20-year-olds’ need for freedom, transgression and passion; in the 1990s the indie rock of Afterhours gives voice to restless 30-year-olds who experience loves on the edge, “molesting loves.” Then comes the angry and provocative rap of Fabri Fibra, and finally the hipster and retro aesthetics of the 1910s, with the poignant comeback romanticism of Thegiornalisti. Endrigo, Celentano, Vecchioni, Gaber, Dalla, and then Gianna Nannini, Renato Zero, Vasco, De Gregori, Zucchero, Mia Martini, and again Jovanotti, Laura Pausini, the Articolo 31, Ligabue, 883, Battiato, Tiziano Ferro, Negramaro, Elisa, Subsonica, Marracash: are just some of the names that make up this extraordinary love songbook, in which the author also puts himself out there in the first person by tracing his sentimental upbringing and investigating how his way of experiencing love relationships and family affections has changed over time.