“Giovanna Marini is one of the most explosive personalities of our post-war period. By following her path, her passions and her encounters, one can follow the unofficial history of our country”.
This is how Moni Ovadia, artistic director of the Terni Film Festival, talks about the voice of Italian popular song, who passed away on 8 May 2024 at the age of 87.
Marini was a guest at the Terni festival in 2022 to present the documentary Giovanna, stories of a voice by Chiara Ronchini, with which he won the Dominioni Angel for Best Soundtrack.
“He is a beautiful angel – he commented – who transmits great harmony and embraces everyone with very long arms”.
“Giovanna is one of the treasures of Italian living art” Ovadia said as he welcomed her to the Cinema Politeama: “There is no one who has moved like her, there are no possible comparisons. Many of us have experimented with the music of the oral tradition, but what Giovanna did is something else and cannot be contained in a single definition”.
“Trains to Reggio Calabria it’s sort of Iliad of the struggles of the workers’ movement” adds the artist of Bulgarian origins: “It’s a epos narrative, not just a musical moment. Giovanna drank in oral culture and then returned it with incredible majesty”.
“I came to singing in the oral tradition diagonally” replied Marini, speaking at the evening: “I studied music, and falling in love with music, I fell in love with the sound of the words, of the voices that sang. So, little by little, I began to fall in love with the faces of those who sing. And everything became a world that accompanied me throughout my life, like Lalla: the old lady from Giulianello who tells us more and more things and seems animated by an ever greater passion”.
On that occasion Giovanna Marini had underlined the importance of the exchange between generations, also demonstrated by the fact that – after her – Marialuna Cipolla, artistic director of Istess Musica, took to the stage of the Politeama with the songwriters of the competition “A song for the Terni Film Festival”.
“I think the work of conduction of memory from the elderly to the young is important: it is a new memory that overcomes barriers. We must allow ourselves to be influenced by this memory.”
Marini had also paid homage to two people from Terni: Valentino Paparelli, the greatest scholar of popular songs and Lucilla Galeazzi, a folk singer-songwriter who had debuted with her in the 1970s and whose choir had enlivened the evening at the festival.
“Valentino was the first to recognize the importance of this memory, he followed me and Lucilla – and he was looking for people who would carry forward this memory hidden among the folds, among the people, among the clothes, among the slogans, among the words pronounced during the demonstrations: the memory of the people”.
“When people sing about what happens – he concluded – it means that people are alive, and the fear we all have now is finding out that we are dead”.
