There were 50 thousand in Bari for the first of four dates, strictly sold out, at San Nicola. A collective ritual that gives an emotion called Vasco Rossi.
The shuttles that leave from the central station are walking stages. Packed in, beers warmed by the sun in their hands, Vasco’s fans start singing on the buses that cross the city headed towards their destination. They come from all over Italy, they are various generations. “How many concerts have you seen this year? Don’t tell me it’s the first,” they ask, “I’ve seen them all.”
The San Nicola, the spaceship as everyone calls it, welcomes the ‘aliens’ who illuminate the night with the lights of their mobile phones. Someone, who has been waiting for hours under the sun tempered by a light rain in the afternoon, is about to faint, feels sick, but doesn’t want to be taken away from the place under the stage that he earned with sweat.
Many waited for him in tents for days on the hot asphalt around the stadium.
A puff of smoke announces his arrival. The crowd ‘slaps’ the barriers that separate them from the idol. Vasco rises from the underworld to take his fans straight to heaven. “Welcome – he says – this is the most powerful concert in the universe, welcome to the first poker concert in Bari” which until June 30th will attract 200 thousand people for the “magnificent four”.
Then, after mentioning Prime Minister ‘Giorgia’ in Asilo republic – “there will be order and discipline more than before” – dedication You shoot at him “to all the scoundrels who rule this world”.
“What you feel cannot be explained here”, when the mega stage becomes one with the lawn and the stands ‘conquered’ by the music and the images on the curved screens.
For him, after all, “it doesn’t take much”, like his song which reads “it doesn’t take much to be intolerant”, to which Vasco adds “tell it to Salvini”, and then “it’s enough to be just a little ignorant… like Salvini” .
Among the great hits he sings Rewind, with women taking off their bras and dancing ‘freely’; Reckless life, There are those who say no and Bubbles. And when the Gallo with his bass line points out that Just us, the people of Vasco remember being in the presence of the author of the best Italian rock song of the century.
And if “sadness can be contained in a song”, the same cannot be done with the joy that his infinite repertoire gives. But even when the curtain is about to fall on the concert, Vasco promises that “every end is a new beginning”.
A’clear dawn which, by tradition, sends everyone home ‘satiated’, amidst the fireworks exploding from the top of the stage, to dream of the next time together in a stadium.
