Pacific, my tribe’s history

This article is published in issue 18 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 3, 2022.

Piavery poor childhood in Campania, a single room to be divided into many brothers and no father, at the age of seven he lost his mother and grew up in an orphanage with the nuns. Romanticism is a bourgeois luxury and when, later in life, a man appears in his life, he accepts his court and marries him. He is Guido, histrionic and very lively, an exhibitionist thread. Together they decide, like many in the early 1960s, to emigrate to the North, a Milan, looking for luck. On the outskirts of the big city, a little “heart in hand”, a little ferociously racist towards the “southerners”, two beloved children are born: Gino and Emma. The first born will become a famous songwriter, Pacificamong the most sought-after songwriters in Italy (he signs, among others, for Gianna Nannini And Ornella Vanoni). Gino De Crescenzo58, has collected the story of this family – as weird as they all are up close – in a beautiful memoir Me and my family of
barbarians (The ship of Theseus, pp. 176, € 18).

Why this book now?
“Maybe I’m the age of someone who is starting to look at the roots. The trigger came from my mother, who a
afternoon he had told me an anecdote: his mother who, thanks to a note given by
carabinieri, goes to the Opera and takes her with him, hiding her under his coat. But at a certain point little Pia runs out of pee. She has no choice in her: she does it in the theater. After this story, my mother asked me: “Write it down, because that’s how it stays”. And then the scene was populated with faces and ghosts ».

Like his father Guido, an incredible character.
“It had the Neapolitan twist. On his deathbed the latest joke: he told me that he felt he had arrived. I asked him: “Are you sure?”. And he made the horns, like Totò ».

His mother Pia is the mainstay of the family.
“For many years she was in danger of her life. But she is always crazy. Once, after yet another interminable surgery, I saw her in the hospital with a livid face. I was a kid, stunned. She said, “Don’t make that face, those were the problems of life … Got it? These are not the problems of life ”».

A lesson for you?
«I believe that this strength, this sense of saying: ‘Yes, we can do it, everything is resolved’, they passed it on to me».

Embarrassed for this colorful family?
“At 16, I was ashamed of the smut on my father’s clothes, of his incredible extroversion, of the clouds of fried food that hung around the house. But already at 20 I looked at all this with affection ».

In a family that had the value of hard work and lived on bills, how did you manage to become a musician?
«My father bought me the first guitar, with bills. After graduation, the Bank of Italy called me, I did three interviews and each one I was more and more arrogant because I did not want to be hired. Instead they offered me the job. I refused. It was a tragedy for months. Even today my mother sometimes lets herself go to regret: “Eh, of course that time …” ».

But then they even saw it in Sanremo.
“I used to find my father under the stage at unlikely concerts. One day I discovered a notebook in which he had transcribed all the songs from my first record. He couldn’t encourage me openly, but he secretly supported me. ‘