News Claudio Baglioni in Palmi

The City of Palmi welcomed Claudio Baglioni with great affection, interest and curiosity. The artist was present for the National Festival of Law and Literature which is taking place these days and which began last April 17th.

The organization curated by magistrate Antonio Salvati, on the evening of April 18, put music at the center, linking it to law and vice versa: law linked to music.

The free tickets to listen to Baglioni sold out in just a few minutes and unfortunately many were left empty-handed. Many people arrived from far away, spending many hours travelling. The meeting was so interesting that one can only say that it wasn’t worth it.

The Palmi festival, which is open to all, is aimed at a heterogeneous audience and will end on April 21st.

This year he has scheduled a meeting with an unusual title: “But what music is law”. It is on this occasion that Claudio Baglioni exposed thoughts and stories relating to music and his being a musician.

The Manfroce Theater in Palmi was packed with people, including fans and onlookers, within its limit capacity of 600 people. The luckiest were able to attend this particular convention which gave an unpublished portrait to those who know little about the Roman artist.

Lost Men: law, news and human frailty discussed at the Law and Literature Festival in Palmi

Michele Caccamo is a poet and writer from Taurianova. He has a publishing house in Rome and is a great friend and connoisseur of Claudio Baglioni’s texts. He was responsible for the participation of the singer-songwriter who, for the first time present at a similar conference, preferred logos to melody. In the end, someone was a little disappointed because he was also hoping for a musical intervention by Baglioni. But since the meeting at the theater involved something else, Claudio Baglioni consistently did not sing, but his songs were obviously talked about. We talked above all about the lyrics linked to music which sometimes take on an autonomous life, but which for Baglioni remain fragile words since they do not have such a strong power that they can travel on their own.

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The fragility of the word

Baglioni, who is popular for his love songs, said it is much more difficult to write about this topic than a social issue.

In reality, Baglioni has published almost 400 songs and only a few of the love songs, although beautiful, do not fully describe the artist.

Personally, I disagree with Baglioni because his masterpiece “Oltre”, although containing beautiful lyrics linked to the theme of love, has a central story that is much broader and more complex, centered precisely on the person. Man is seen in his complexity and imperfection, in continuous evolution, revealing himself to the world as part of a whole and, at the same time, as a distinct unit that sometimes does not recognize itself, falls and gets back up again. As in a spiral journey, man perfects himself during the same journey, arriving at a higher point of existence.

Baglioni spoke about his friendship with Caccamo, revealing that thanks to him he reached Rosarno by train, admiring the Calabrian sea after a heavy downpour. Remembering when Marilyn Monroe made her “reassuring” presence among the soldiers during the American wars overseas.

Those who know Claudio Baglioni well know how cultured he is and how his monologues are always profound and never banal. The human frailty that was the central theme of the meeting is repeatedly expressed in his songs.

Interventions on law and music in the songs of Claudio Baglioni

As a true master of the musical scenes, even just in speech, the artist told personal stories linked to his career, but also anecdotes linked to his family. His parents are always present in the musician’s thoughts and even recently, receiving the Capitoline Wolf in Rome, he wanted to dedicate the award to his parents.

The story of when his parents moved to Rome from the Umbrian countryside is very evocative, linking this memory to the landings in Calabria and his Lampedusa (Baglioni, in my opinion, would have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for O’ Scià). Emigration seen in the post-war period as a dream, yes, but with an eye on the future and the present, leaving behind a past of hunger and poverty, most of the time. At the center of life there was the certainty of a better life, but also the honesty of which father Riccardo Baglioni made his personal “reputation”. Baglioni also mentioned the period of the 1960s and young people who had the desire to build a better future for themselves and future generations. A dream later betrayed, well described in songs like “In Viaggio”, for example.

The dream is often the central theme in Baglioni’s songs as energy to move forward and to face life itself.

Music and law, a speech dedicated to the ‘Ndrangheta in Palmi

The theme of the evening then moved on to human dignity, a dignity that should be supported by laws and rights. Human frailties would need a social system to guarantee their dignity.

The interventions were moderated by magistrate Salvati who spoke little about Baglioni’s music, focusing more on personal rights.

Together with Michele Caccamo they talked about a Hikikomori phenomenon. People who prefer to isolate themselves, even committing suicide, in order to not have contact with people and the outside world. When “staying apart” becomes pathology. The phenomenon, initially noticed in Japan, has over 1 million cases in Japan; unfortunately it has also been found in Italy with increasing numbers.

The fragility that becomes a social emergency and which should be monitored by the right to human dignity, in essence.

The journalist Riccardo Giacoia, chief editor of Tgr Rai Calabria, instead expressed satisfaction with Baglioni’s presence in Palmi and in Calabria.

However, the theme of “Lost Men” was not fully addressed, in my opinion, preferring to talk about a Calabria condemned by the ‘Ndrangheta and by crime. A Calabria victim that can hardly get out of it. In this speech the theme of music, especially that of Baglioni, did not emerge. Although the wonderful “Lost Men” also talks about murderers and violent people, the central theme is human, not crime news.

The author Baglioni in “Lost Men” described people devoted to a life without human dignity who had once been children with a family, trips and innocent games. Adult people lost from the world who one day perhaps dreamed of a different life and who had the fears and joys of all the children in the world.

Obviously, we don’t want to deny that Calabria doesn’t have this problem related to crime, but law and music did not emerge in an intervention that would have been right when talking about legality.

Thanks to Annamaria Gnisci for CalabriaMagnifica.IT