CARLO PESTELLI
1. Italo Calvino and Sergio Liberovici, “Dove vola l’avvoltoio?”
From: Cantacronache 1. Italia Canta EP 45/C/0001, 1958, 45rpm.
Pietro Buttarelli: voice.
The celebrated writer Italo Calvino was one of the first authors to write for free lyrics for the Cantacronache collective. In “Dove vola l’avvoltoio?” (Where Does the Vulture Fly?), with music by Sergio Liberovici, the vulture personifies the war’s outcomes, which eventually annihilate also those that boost all armed conflicts.
2. Dario Baraldi and Fausto Amodei, “Raffaele”
From: Cantacronache 2. Italia Canta EP 45/C/0002, 1958, 45rpm.
Fausto Amodei: voice and guitar.
The song tells of Raffaele, a young Mexican who used to play with toy soldiers as a child, and always liked to hang the General. During the Mexican Revolution the young man follows Pancho Villa, and in the second part of the song, as a romantic revolutionary, he falls in love with the daughter of a General. When the General finds out about Raffaele’s political ideas, he promptly orders him to be hung from the nearest plum tree. The lyrics are by Dario Baraldi, an office worker at Olivetti (a typewriter manifacturer).
3. Fausto Amodei, “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia”
From: Cantacronache 6. Italia Canta EP 45/C/0016, 1960, 45rpm.
Fausto Amodei: voice and guitar.
Probably the most known Cantacronache song, “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia” (To the Dead in Reggio Emilia) achieved a huge success in 1960s and 1970s and it is still performed in Italy. The song is inspired by an event that occurred in the summer of 1960. The Christian Democratic Party was at the time facing a serious parliamentary crisis and was forced to accept votes from the extreme Right in order to form a new government. A large number of enraged citizens gathered in a public protest against the return of Fascists to government. In Reggio Emilia, a peaceful open-air demonstration turned into a massacre when police opened fire on the crowd, killing five protesters, mainly young men, in what became an Italian version of Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday. Amodei, who at the time was doing military service in the Veneto region, wrote the song listing by name the five men killed by the police.