Giulia Sorrentino
A piece of Italian music has been lost, an unusual icon that represents our culture in Italy and around the world. Ornella Vanoni, who was, above all, one of Italy’s greatest translators, is leaving. The singer of “Senza fine” and “L’avventura” died in Milan at the age of 91, after an illness at his home in the Lombard capital. After all, it was he who said, “I am not afraid of death. I will understand when it is time to go, when I have become useless to life and life has become useless to me. I do not want to do like my aunt, who lived to be 107 years old: torture. Her mind was clear and her body was weak. She could not die and was in despair. She looked up at the ceiling and whispered: ‘Lord, take me away’.” Genuine, in his voice, in his movements, but most importantly in the genuine irreverence he never stops showing. But more than anything, Vanoni has been able to embody the passage of time without losing its originality. He worked with Gino Paoli, with Enzo Jannacci, with Tenco, with the Brazilian Toquinho and Vinícius de Moraes in 1976 which revealed an album that today is still considered a bridge between Brazil and Milan. With a voice that no one can imitate and an irony that makes him instantly recognizable. Each decade at least belonged to him a little: the sixties with Sanremo, the seventies with experimentation, the eighties with a new maturity that never prevented him from remaining contemporary. To celebrate her today is to recognize who she was: one of our most cultured, courageous and long-lived interpreters of music, a woman who never gave in to the temptation to please, who searched all her life for the right nuance, the right word, the right rhythm.
