SYNOPSIS

A visual and sonorous journey into the poetic and irreverent imagery of the Italian singer Lucio Dalla.

This documentary presents an untold narration of Dalla’s world, through the words of his faithful manager Tobia and his childhood friend Stefano Bonaga. The film mixes biography and history, reality and imagination, as portrayed by the found footage, both public and private, official and amateur. Here, lyrics and music illustrate an underground and nuanced Italy, a free narration of the country’s history through tragic events and economic boom. This is the Italy of the underdogs and the marginalized: Dalla’s Italy.

How do you tell Lucio Dalla's story?

Tough one. Lucio Dalla was elusive, he slipped through your fingers.

A quicksilver, multitalented figure, he defied intuition and couldn't be pigeonholed. He was an actor, clown, jazzman, wanderer, hero, poet, singer, prophet, transformer and provocateur.

In all likelihood, there's no need to tell the Dalla tale, as it was exceptional and that should suffice. Yet we're still here, wondering …

Is anything lacking? Did we miss something?

For sure, Lucio Dalla touched life with shaky hands and drank it in with eyes as bright as a child's. He embraced his times.

In that sense, Per Lucio isn't a film about Lucio Dalla, but a symphony of images and music that represent the world he imagined and sang about: piazzas, bars, whores and tramps.

I've wanted to tell the Lucio Dalla story for so long. The project took shape over the years. Even as a child, I listened to his songs over and over again on my dad's record player. I fell head over heels for his music, his world, and the lyrics that embraced an era, becoming part of the public and private imagination of Italians, equally popular with the mighty and the humble, men and women. My passion rekindled over the years and later I met him in person at the Bologna launch of La bocca del Lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf).

Even before his death, I was determined to make a film telling the story of Italy using his songs and the human and artistic episodes of his life. Per Lucio is that film, the result of a pledge given so long ago.

My aim in making this film – written with Marcello Anselmo – wasn't to produce a lifelike portrait or a homage of the singer. I preferred to hint at his psychedelic career, his radical personality and sheer genius. To do so, I borrowed the voices of his manager Tobia and the philosopher Stefano Bonaga, Lucio's childhood friend. People who knew him first of all as a man and then as an artist, and therefore offer us a more intimate and everyday portrait. Their testimonies appear against a backdrop of images from public, private and amateur archives. These images cast light on Dalla's existence from his initial struggles to his dynamic rise to success, his fortuitous partnership with poet Roberto Roversi, then the more mature period, when Lucio moved away from Roversi and became a well-established, refined and popular author. To bring to life the song Il Parco della Luna (The Park of the Moon), I even made use of original material from La Bocca del lupo, recycling images, a favorite ploy of mine.

Some of the masterpieces created by the Dalla–Roversi duo are central to my narrative. I've always been an admirer of Roversi, a rigorous, singular intellectual and a key reference figure on the Italian cultural horizon. Meeting with Dalla, this great Bologna poet was able to engage with a wider, more proletarian class, taking his poetry beyond the rules of the great culture industry. Thanks to Roversi, Dalla learned to plumb new depths for the use of words, fulfilling his desire to get inside political and world matters. For the first time, he could sing about emigration, pollution and war.

What always strikes me about Dalla's lyrics and music is their movie-like muscle. He casts a lucidly biting glance over Italy and its changes, anticipating the dynamics of a country coming into modern times while also negotiating inevitable contradictions. Artistic vision rooted in his awareness of exclusion, empathizing with the people and everyday life that unknowingly make history.

Consequently, to reconstruct and expand both the social and historical imagery of Dalla's narrative, and include images that conjure up the singer's life, I spliced in repertory material to illustrate Italy's history from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Guided by the storylines of Lucio's lyrics, I sought out, then brought to the surface the controversial, chaotic and passionate Italy that emerged after the first two post-war decades: the 1960s and 1970s, with their economic boom and changes, their vibrant hustle and bustle. Then the future, the speed, the changes occurring in the final decade of the Short Century. I found forgotten films that told the stories of the outcasts so close to Dalla's heart, alternating them with the more lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek episodes that best express the most profound and tragicomical soul of our country.

Roberto Roversi was born in Bologna in 1923. After the September 8, 1943 armistice, he was drafted to the Monterosa Division and trained in Germany. When he returned to Italy, he deserted the army and joined the Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) partisan group in Piedmont. In the post-war period, he opened the Palmaverde antique bookshop in Bologna, which he ran for sixty years. From 1955 to 1959, with Pier Paolo Pasolini, he was co-editor of the literary magazine Officina (Office), a pillar of post-war Italian culture. He was a committed, rigorously revolutionary poet who became a point of reference for Italy's entire literary and political scenario.

In 1973, music producer Renzo Cremonini invited him to write lyrics for Lucio Dalla. After that first encounter, they produced three albums – Un'automobile Targata TO (Car with the License Plate TO), Anidride Solforosa, Automobili – that were a watershed moment in Dalla's career for style, poetics and content. They found chemistry: Roversi's lyrics attacked the transformations and contradictions of Italian public and private development; the meter of his lyrics was showcased and counterpointed by Dalla's music and voice. The result was a triptych of poetry set to music that wrote a brand new page in Italian music.

LUCIO’S ITALY

The film develops around a period in the country's recent history and overlaps with various aspects of Lucio's life and work. The effect is a sort of jigsaw puzzle in which pieces of general history are slotted with pieces of specific history. The country's evolution after World War II is told through a picture story of its reconstruction as well as the industrial and cultural rebirth marking the 1950s and '60s. Italy became the mirror image of the massive anthropological mutation of its society, reflected in the weakly forged development of cities and urban space. From the huge worker migration to the loss of Italy's farmers and the establishment of a blue-collar nation in which cars and motorways peopled landscapes. The Mille Miglia (Thousand Miles) automobile competition, with its speeding cars and driver–heroes, became the expression of the thousands of men and women workers who were the backbone of the Italy's mega FIAT plant.

Social contradictions can be read in the texts – first Roversi's, then Dalla's – and take shape in images revealing harsh times for social development. Wild consumerism and the uprising of those excluded from it; the ruling class and the subversive actions that scarred the country with terrorist bombs and attacks, ending in slaughters like the destruction of Bologna train station on August 2, 1980.

Here, Italian history isn't just archival, it's an uncompromising version of history that molds an overview through the eyes of an artist and poet.