Elisa: “The wind makes my rounds”

This article is published in number 6 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 8, 2022

Elisa knows that the wind turns around and things turn back: “I have a profound relationship with memories, even material ones. They are memory, passions and feelings. An invisible guide that helps me to orient myself and to be the person I am today. I still have the Frisbee that Simone and I used to play with as children. If I lost it it would be a great pain ». Simone was Elisa’s best friend. He died at 13. He wanted to play, sing, express himself. She took a blank sheet of paper and folded it into the secrets of adolescence: “I will make the world dream with my music“. A promise kept, held in place at the time William Blake was reading. “He used to say that no bird, if it flies with its own wings, flies too high.” And with her own wings, Elisa, she saw the world from an inclined plane. She sat on the clouds, swooped down to win prizes, collaborations and recognitions, and then returned to a middle-earth of her own to invent, to create, “to believe that if you don’t stop, you’ll always learn something new” .

The success that fifteen years ago called a horror film, “which on the one hand makes you close your eyes and on the other prevents you from stopping watching”, is now something that you no longer pay attention to. In the sharpest self-portrait imaginable, he calls himself “a pet.” And then he laughs, because he knows there is nothing to add. So one who has not lost curiosity, but has doubts. One who has traveled the planet, but she has remained to live in the place where she was born. One that does not turn its back on contradictions, because choosing also means changing your mind. Elisa is always looking for the light. Perhaps, not by chance, it was the title of the song that on a Sanremo night 21 years ago plunged her into a parallel galaxy: “On my return, in the place where I live, they welcomed me more or less like the Pope”. It may be because we can’t help but regret or because seeing ourselves young consoles again, but for those who attend the secular rite on the Riviera it will be like being 20 years old, wearing “a baggy sweater over a pair of jeans” and knowing that there is “nothing wrong “. To thank Raffaella Carrà, in 2001, there was another Elisa.

The twenty-three-year-old “wild who lacked awareness of many things”, the frontier girl who had started working early: “In a place, Monfalcone, where wearing overalls and getting your hands dirty was almost the rule, without giving excessive weight at the registry office “, the flower picked by Caterina Caselli who – quickly – had immediately identified, even before her talent, the absolute vocal and existential anomaly and not yet of age sent her” to hear “America.

Of the freedom that was the hallmark of her parable, Elisa is jealous. Nobody knew how much she cost her and in testing her, the daredevils found that she was priceless. “Being far from the perfection that basically scares me and from which I keep away, as is obvious, I’ve been wrong many times. I fell, I got up, I fell again. I made a mistake in a few choices, I paid for it on my skin, and I’m not just talking about work“. Opportunities are lost. And affections are lost. It hurts, every time, as if it were the first: “The friends, the loves, the people on whom you had relied on, if they evaporate, they burn like wounds.” But “those are also needed, because in some way you have to stand up. The important thing is not to get lost, not to give up on what one is, on what one wants to say, on a sense of justice that I have developed since I was a child, without even knowing why “.

Elisa who has never been governable. Elisa that she loves «the lightness that she knows how to go deep and in this sense my unattainable ideal, for which I felt and feel boundless admiration is Bob Marley». Elisa that if she looks back she finds the whole spectrum of colors. The darkness of pain: “I had to deal with a father, mine, who was a hard worker but whom I saw little and who was absent in certain fundamental moments.“. The dazzling whiteness of the examples: “My grandfather, a partisan who had a very bad time in the war and had survived the deportation, knew how to smile and play down.” The saturated madness of the little shows orchestrated in the provinces by a band of hairdressers, her mother in the head, with more passion for David Bowie than for the high shade. The blue darkness of the unconsciousness of an age in which if you are not mistaken, you are not: «I did my bullshit and I was happy to have done it. Adolescence is half hell and anyone who says otherwise is lying. It is the era of emergence, of confrontation, of swimming in the open sea without a shore on the horizon. A free zone in which not making mistakes is more than difficult is unnatural ». The Polaroids are faded, but nothing has been erased. That time when for the noises “and for the mess the police came and I risked arrest”and the other one that “I arrived in London for many days driving a Dyane full of musical instruments in the English countryside.” There was a destination, even if it wasn’t marked on the map. Elisa has found her place in a non-place that is basically the place that most resembles her. The parties that “were promised”, as the Doors sang, she honored them: “By emptying the refrigerator without guilt,” as she should have been. It was another Elisa, but without her there wouldn’t even be today’s one: «Perhaps less dazed, but happy to have had my experiences».