Prestigious penthouse or ruin to be restored? Every time February arrives (in this case March) it is as if the Italians are divided into two parties: the one that sees the Sanremo Festival as the building of wonders and the one that would like to get rid of it by auctioning it as soon as possible. Everyone talks about it, but not everyone looks at it. Or, at least, that’s what they say. Then maybe on Twitter they can also tell you the color of the belt that Achille Lauro wore the night before, and then some doubts that they haven’t re-read a classic by Céline without taking a quick look at the TV a little bit comes to you.
It remains that the festival coat of arms, the inheritance that, willy-nilly, was handed over to us by our ancestors, has existed for seventy-one years and is in excellent health. If we listened to that very certain faction that generalist television is now with the drip attached to the USB output, it would not be explained how Sanremo continues to represent one of the few topics of conversation that can be spent on every occasion, a bit like the black cocktail dress that goes with everything.
But how is it that the Festival has resisted all these years parading before our eyes like a beautiful lady of seventy-one fresh from a hairdresser and with shoes perfectly matched to the suit? The answer could be linked to many factors, not least the idea of ​​modernizing itself while changing little or nothing of its original structure. Always a litmus test of political and social controversies, the Italian Song Festival now has broad shoulders: almost every year is accompanied by a scandal, and the more sensational this is, the more the Festival earns. The most dramatic case, however, remains that linked to the disappearance of Luigi Tenco that, following the elimination of his song Hello love hello he took his own life letting all the frivolities fly away as if pushed by the Mistral that blows on the Riviera. On the other hand, in the following years they would have made headlines Rino Gaetano, who in 1978 risked being lynched for being the first to say the word “sex” on stage, but also Adriano Celentano, which when he won together with Claudia Mori with the song Who does not work does not make love he was accused of inciting scabbing. On the other hand, that the controversy should go down with the velvet glove instead of the spiked halberd is something that the public has never fully understood.
In short, there have been too many disputes in Sanremo in seventy-one years, together with scandals and twists, of course. Like when Freddie Mercury, heedless of the festival norm that in the eighties required guests and competing singers to sing in lip-sync, he didn’t give a damn and out of phase the lip of the song Radio Ga Ga in protest. Or how when Madonna, returning to Sanremo three years after the last time, he mistook Raimondo Vianello for Pippo Baudo: “You’ve changed” he said before being hurriedly dismissed by the conductor, who didn’t understand a word. That Sanremo has written the history of Italian music and customs, however, is beyond question: the triumph of In the blue painted blue, the fake baby bump of Loredana Bertè who seemed to tell women that not even a pregnancy could prevent them from wearing a very tight black leather dress, and the rainbow ribbons hanging from the microphone pole in support of civil unions prove it in all respects. Sanremo, on the other hand, is our Super Bowl, and even if you said not to follow even a minute (especially this year that, inevitably, we are all called to stay at home), we probably wouldn’t believe you: because Sanremo is Sanremo.
Browse the gallery above to discover 71 pills of the 71 years of the Festival that you (perhaps) missed >>
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