A journey through the Naples of yesterday and today through the songs of Pino Daniele that continue to speak to us about the present.
The “dirtiest papers” of a city loved and criticized without ever losing hope for change.
The story of the places, suspended between cholera and earthquake, where the extraordinary artist finds inspiration for the first, timeless songs of scathing denunciation. Then, moment by moment, the historic concert of 1981 with two hundred thousand angry and dreaming young people, but also the many disappointments suffered in a metropolis that too often turned out to be a stepmother, the reason why Pino Daniele he chooses to move away and now his ashes are kept in Magliano in Tuscany.
Homage to a poet of modernity, who dreamed of returning to his alleys, “to mammà’s house”, as he often repeats on the beach of Sabaudia during short but intense dialogues with the author.
Finally in a free Naples, no longer illuminated by a “bitter sun”, a place where a twenty-four year old musician, Giovanbattista Cutolo, known as Giogiò, is killed for no reason.
He took the first steps of his career in the same alleys where the extraordinary human and artistic adventure of the “Latin Mascalzone” began. In Faccia Gialla he turns to San Gennaro, a secular prayer to ask the patron saint to free his land from the Camorra. A song written in 1989 when Daniele sensed the drift, even cultural, of his city.
Pino, an everlasting symbol of many generations later betrayed by politics and perhaps defeated by history, but who never stop believing that the dawn will come.
Article published on 8 February 2025 - 13:12
