The Italian singer Ornella Vanoni, one of the great ladies of Italian song, with a sensual and melancholic voice, died this Friday at her home in Milan at the age of 91 due to a sudden cardiac arrest. Italy is surrounded by pain and, once again, by a great nostalgia for its best years. She was one of the greatest, together with Mina, who today remains one of the last survivors of a golden era, together with Adriano Celentano and a few others, when Italian music went beyond its borders and created its own myths.
Ornella Vanoni, with a very free character and life, full of madness, loves and breakups, was one of those myths. He created some of the most beautiful Italian songs, of uncommon depth, masterpieces and adult works of authorial music of the Seventies, such as The appointment (The quotewith that heartfelt but only whispered prayer: “Love, come quickly, I can’t resist. / If you don’t come, I don’t exist”) or Tomorrow is another day. Passionate, skeptical, philosophical songs full of love for life, all at the same time.
Vanoni remained active and fighting until the end. Last year he gave a concert at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, released an album and appeared almost every week on a popular TV show, What’s the weather like?where it had a fixed section where there was no script. He simply sat down and said what he wanted, between lucidity, irony and surrealism. She was a great character and few people were more interesting in an interview in her later years than her, who with her sharp and ironic tongue had no problem talking about anything, what she thought about anything and telling about her life.
Hers was a very public life, because right from the start, due to her talent, her beauty and her ease in getting into trouble, she was at the center of the press’s attention. Since his debut at the age of 19 in the Milanese theater with the famous theater director Giorgio Strehler, his first great love. As a singer she distinguished herself very early, for her elegant and sinuous voice, and for her stage presence, of sophisticated beauty and strong personality. Her hair, the mane of a lioness, the expansive curls, were one of her identifying features.
In the Sixties she became very famous and formed a stormy and powerful artistic and sentimental union with another of her most famous love stories, the singer Gino Paoli, who was married. It inspired classic titles, such as Sales flavour OR Without good. Those were years in which the San Remo Festival was almost the center of the European musical world and the tabloid press, full of legends and gossip about Italian music, drugs and alcohol, so intense that one day, in 1963, Paoli shot himself in the heart, even though he missed it, and ended up in hospital. Vanoni went to visit him at the hospital at dawn, to avoid photographers, and said they had a great laugh.
Four years later, his friend Luigi Tenco repeated the desperate gesture, outraged at having been eliminated from the festival, although in his case he actually committed suicide. Lucio Dalla has found his body.
Vanoni went through all the decades before him, adapting to the times and music of each era. She also starred in a dozen films as an actress. Without fear of anything, she was one of the first to introduce Brazilian rhythms and bossa nova to Italy, adapting them to her voice and language together with Vinicius de Moraes and Toquinho, whom she had brought from Brazil and practically adopted for a few months. His voice was a great instrument and he also explored jazz, with none other than Herbie Hancock. In the 1980s he flirted with disco music and sold out a triumphant tour with Gino Paoli.
Among her many friends and ex-lovers, with whom she always continued to have a good relationship, there was Pier Paolo Pasolini, an unrequited love, as happened to María Callas, because the poet and director was homosexual, but she didn’t care, because she defended falling in love even without sex. “Pasolini was our Cassandra, the things he sensed were real and future”. Curious, hedonistic, Milanese to the core, she says that one of the few men who had truly intimidated her was Cardinal Caralo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan. “I laugh at David Bowie,” he said.
In one of her last interviews she recalled that during the war her father would lie down next to her during the bombings to protect her with his body. “It ruined my relationship with those men, because I was convinced that they too would let themselves be killed to protect me. But then no one ever protected me. Maybe I didn’t want to be protected,” she commented.
He floated through life, with its ups and downs, even depression, which he had to face at times. He loved life and said he had been “very happy and also very unhappy”. “It’s like a wave, it comes, it comes, happiness comes, and then it comes, it comes, unhappiness comes,” he summed up. This is why he interpreted very well in memorable songs the malaise and complexity of a country that in the 1960s, after the economic boom, discovered a certain disillusionment with love and money, an existential void that was a central theme in the great cinema and great Italian music of those years. “An intelligent, force-sensitive person must be melancholic,” he said.
A few years ago he had to leave his home in Milan and move to a smaller apartment because, as he confessed, he was left with 30 euros in the bank. “Family reasons, pay this, pay that, but it doesn’t matter to me,” he explained. This is how I lived life. This Saturday, in thousands of homes in Italy, one of his most touching songs will be heard with more meaning than ever, Tomorrow is another day(Tomorrow is another day): “It’s one of those days when melancholy takes over…”.
