Sei nell’anima was released on May 2, a Netflix docufilm dedicated to the life of Gianna Nannini, queen of Italian rock. Recently interviewed, the Tuscan artist told some other details about her life prior to the great success that then hit her.
Promotional photo by Gianna Nannini – Spetteguless.it
When you think of Italian rock, it’s impossible not to go to mind Gianna Nannini, Tuscan artist, author of some of the most beautiful songs in our country’s musical repertoire. Born in Siena in 1954 into an upper-class family, she always dreamed of working in the world of the seven notes, and this is why in the Seventies she began to present herself to various record companies in Milan and Rome, finally attracting the attention of Mara Maionchi, manager of Mogol and Lucio Battisti’s Numero Uno at the time.
It was the music producer who valorised her, allowing her to take part in Un disco per l’estate 1974. Her first album dates back to 1976, but it was only in the following decade that Nannini achieved success thanks to singles like America, Latin lover and above all Fotoromanza in 1984.
It is the consecration for the artist, which will coincide with a very difficult period on a personal level, due to the psychotic breakdown of which he will be the victim. Among Gianna’s many successes, Un’estate italiana should certainly be remembereda duet performed with Edoardo Bennato which was the soundtrack to the Italia 90 World Cup.
Gianna Nannini reveals the secret of her success: painful but educational
Lately Gianna Nannini took part in Gianluca Gazzoli’s format, BSMT, and with him he retraced some particular moments of his extraordinary career, also revealing the secret behind his rock soul and it’s something that no one would have ever expected. As the artist’s fans know well, Nannini has two missing phalanges, due to an accident that occurred during her years of studies at the conservatory.
“I worked in my father’s pastry shop which he was renovating to become a ricciarelli factory. I was thinking about running away from home and I was putting the money aside: I already had a plan.” the singer began to explain, then added “So that day the machine was a bit broken and I was trying to fix these trays, when I got my hand stuck in the gear and it completely severed two of my phalanges”.
“It’s a beastly pain and I always say that my voice was born from this rock scream of pain” she then concluded, not before revealing that she had had two fake phalanges done in order to complete the piano exam at the conservatory. It was precisely at that moment, with the wounds still on his hand, that Fotoromanza was born, the artist’s first major success. A vaguely macabre confession, but which Gianna told with a lot of irony, explaining between the serious and the facetious one of her secrets behind her enormous success, which today has allowed her to be counted among the pillars of Italian music.
