Giovanni Lindo Ferretti risked dying just over a month ago: he had a heart attack in Venice from which he was saved thanks to the timely intervention of the emergency services. He revealed it himself on Sunday evening (2 June 2024), on the stage set up in Piazza Duomo in Pietrasanta, where the singer of CCCP – Fedeli alla Linea attended for over an hour on the final day of the “Parole ad Arte” event.
Answering one of the questions from his interlocutors he explained: «I want to say something for the first time: on April 26th I was in Venice to meet Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. At a certain point I had a negative feeling, an ailment that I knew and that I thought I could cure by resting, trying to lie down waiting for it to pass. Luckily Buttafuoco didn’t believe me. He called the ambulance, which, being in Venice, arrived by sea. It all happened quickly, the doctors realized that I had a heart attack in progress and their sudden intervention saved my life.”
The public in the square was astonished, because they did not expect this confession. Moreover, it was already anomalous that the artist considered the father of Italian punk, who was usually shy, would allow himself to engage in public confrontation; it was even more so to hear him talk about such a personal issue that it was the prelude to a long speech on his relationship with death.
«When I was 4 years old my grandmother told me that it was time for me to experience death personally. A relative had passed away. She took me to the wake, she said to me, ‘Touch it, this is the cold of death, you must feel it. You have to understand the difference with the heat of life.’ When I was little, funerals marked the existence of a community: now in fact there are no longer funerals where I live, there is no longer a community.”
Pressed by the reflections of the president of the MAXXI of Rome Alessandro Giuli and by the questions of the journalist Nicolas Ballario, Ferretti concluded the reasoning by talking about the acceptance of the tragedy in the daily dimension: «Death and tragedy in general are components that must be taken into account – he explained -, in fact the sick are sick and are here with us, while those who were considered healthy are all dead”.
For two weeks CCCP, one of the most loved and influential bands in the history of Italian rock and punk, has been performing on a tour that on July 26th he will also bring the show to Florence (Medici Park of Villa Demidoff), after the dates in Rome, Catania, Genoa and Perugia. Almost thirty-four years after their last real concert, Ferretti, Zamboni, Annarella and Fatur have therefore returned to play together (it all started with three special concerts in Berlin at the end of February).
Finally, in his public conversation in Pietrasanta, Ferretti also spoke about young people, the relationship with the other members of the band and the capacity for involvement that the band has demonstrated over time beyond the political-social perimeter from which it started. The collective ritual of concerts taking place these days in Italian squares represents this. As well as Ferretti’s presence in Piazza Duomo in Pietrasanta, which created a real suspension of time, with the crowd silenced and hanging on to his words.
