“We will forever be grateful to Giovanna Marini, for his precious and also courageous research work. We are losing an authentic storyteller.” Angelo Branduardi writes it among the many who say goodbye to Giovanna Marini on social media, who passed away yesterday at the age of 87, summarizing the work and value of this artist. Composer, singer, researcher who dedicated her life to the oral tradition, founding the Testaccio school of popular music in the seventies, the first of her kind, which continues her activity today.
Born in Rome (the city where she disappeared) on 19 January 1937, into a family of musicians, she collaborated with the spearhead of Italian artists – from Calvino to Dario Fo – who tried to bring together cultured and popular literature, which in the Italian tradition have often followed the same line.
Graduated in guitar at the Santa Cecilia conservatory, she perfected her studies with Andres Segovia. At the beginning of the sixties Giovanna Marini he came into contact with the major intellectuals and scholars of the Italian popular tradition, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Roberto Lydi, Gianni Bosio and Diego Carpitella.
In 1964 in Spoleto he took part in the show Hello beautiful, causing scandal and indignant reactions from the public. It is the founding nucleus of the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, it collaborates with the famous Sardinian language poet Peppino Marotto, from whom it learns the art of improvised popular narration, and it is a backbone of the Ernesto De Martino Institute, in which it collects popular songs discovered and cataloged by her.
Among his shows, I think about it and singdirected by Dario Fo in 1965, I’m telling you about America, Church Church and Hero. In 1974 he founded the Popular School of Testaccio in Rome. In 2002 he recorded the album with Francesco De Gregori The steam whistlemaking his name known to the general public after 40 years.
In 2005 he composed the music for Gramsci’s asheson the text by Paolini, from which the album of the same name was taken in 2006.
Pillar of Italian music of the twentieth century, defined as the “Italian Joan Baez”, she has returned to illuminate the value of popular song and its political value, bringing to light in a philological work the New Italian Canzoniere which she takes around the theaters and squares of the peninsula. The material collected in Salento between 1960 and the beginning of the Seventies is important. Her research work earned her the chair of ethnomusicology. She collaborates with Marco Paolini for a work on Ustica, his remains in her history Lament for Pasolinihis Trains to Reggio Calabria.
In all these years he has written a lot of music for theater and cinema: works directed by Attilio Corsini, Marco Mattolini (The spider woman, L’ècole des femmes, Funeral, Penthesilea, Robinson Crusoe merchant of York, Nora Helmerdirected by Carlo Quartucci), Factory by Ascanio Celestini; for the cinema: all the works of Citto Maselli starting from 67 (Open letter to an evening newspaper, Love story, The suspect, The six workers, The sunrise, A photographer’s adventure, Private code, The secret, Chronicles of the third millennium), Café Express by Nanni Loy, Terminal by Paolo Breccia, Teresa Raquin by Giancarlo Cobelli, e others.
In 2016 his music served as the soundtrack to the documentary A town in Calabria focused on the history of the municipality of Riace. His Hello beautiful sung in the heart of Garbatella, it was the soundtrack of April 25, 2023.
(Handle)
