ROME “We will forever be grateful to Giovanna Marini for her precious and courageous research work. We are losing an authentic storyteller.” Angelo Branduardi writes it among the many who say goodbye on social media to Giovanna Marini, who passed away at the age of 87, summarizing the work and value of this artist. She is a 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. she graduated in guitar at the Santa Cecilia conservatory, she perfected her studies with Andres Segovia. At the beginning of the 1960s Giovanna Marini 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 she took part in the show Bella Ciao in Spoleto, 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 her shows are Ci ragione e canto, directed by Dario Fo in 1965, Vi parla dell’America, Chiesa Chiesa ed Eroe. In ’74 you founded the Popular School of Testaccio in Rome. In 2002 she recorded the album Il whistle del vapor with Francesco De Gregori, making her name known to the general public after 40 years. In 2005 she composed the music for Le ceneri di Gramsci, on 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 brings back 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, her Lament for Pasolini and her Trains for Reggio Calabria remain in her history. 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, Funerale, Pentesilea, Robinson Crusoe the Merchant of York, Nora Helmer, directed by Carlo Quartucci), Ascanio Celestini’s Factory; for the cinema: all the works of Citto Maselli starting from 67 (Open letter to an evening newspaper, Love story, Suspicion, The six workers, The sunrise, Adventure of a photographer, Private code, The secret, Chronicles of the third millennium), Café Express by Nanni Loy, Terminal by Paolo Breccia, Teresa Raquin by Giancarlo Cobelli, and others. In 2016 her music was the soundtrack to the documentary Un Paese di Calabria focused on the history of the municipality of Riace. Di lei Di lei ‘Bella ciao’ sung in the heart of Garbatella, soundtrack of 25 April 2023.
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