His first seventy years Francesco De Gregori, the “prince” of Italian music, the poet who has entered the hearts of at least two generations of amateurs, has chosen to live them in absolute discretion and in the expectation of resuming live performances as soon as possible. For him, on the other hand, devouring the stages has never been just a job, but a vocation, something that burned inside him ever since he picked up the guitar and timidly started performing in public under the pressure of his brother Luigi.
Son of a librarian and a teacher of literature, De Gregori immediately let himself be carried away by the bursting energy of the Folkstudio which, among others, will immediately introduce him to artists such as Ernesto Bassignano and Antonello Venditti, with which, Covid permitting, he should perform at the Olimpico in a concert-event scheduled for July 17.
After several collaborations such as the one with Lo Cascio, De Angelis and Venditti himself, Francesco De Gregori begins, however, to mature a hermetic spirit that needs time before refining a scheme, that of the female portrait and the mingling of the high with the bass, which will become the hallmark of a hybrid production, complex, which on the one hand winks at rock and on the other to opera. The great success of Rimmel, the improvised concert with Claudio Baglioni in the Pantheon square in the mid-seventies, the accident at the Palalido in Milan which almost convinces him to never perform live again, lead De Gregori to an artistic maturity that, from songs like General has toured Banana Republic, they immediately transport him to the Olympus of the greats, convincing everyone that the stadiums could be filled not only by rock stars, but also by the brightest stars of the Italian singer-songwriter.
At the Sanremo Festival he participates only once as an author in 1980 thanks to the song Mariù which is presented to Ariston by Gianni Morandi, but De Gregori doesn’t care: the success of the album Titanic of 1982 and, above all, of the EP The Cannon Woman earned him the nickname of “Prince” delicate and impetuous, touchy and sensitive, open to dialogue and ready to accept criticism, such as that raised by the Church for the individual The lamb of God. Years pass, but the desire to create, to get involved, to collaborate with friends and colleagues such as Lucio Dalla and Ron, found after more than twenty years in 2002, is increasingly urgent, increasingly necessary. In his film Masked and anonymous, Bob Dylan defines him as “a legend”, while radio, television and cinema – the soundtrack of Have you ever been to the moon? by Paolo Genovese earned him the Silver Ribbon – they start courting him with increasing insistence: Francesco, however, always remains faithful to himself, to the smoked glasses and the narrow-brimmed hat, to the heart and to the energy that it manages to transmit on stage as if time had never passed and these seventy years were just a number and nothing else.
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