Sanremo 2021: Barbara Palombelli’s monologue on women divides and creates controversy

“This is a special evening that I want to dedicate to all Italian women who today have a fundamental task: to keep the country.” This is how the monologue of Barbara Palombelli, co-host of the fourth evening of the Sanremo Festival. A monologue full of biographical notes, but which tries to speak to a generation that, however, is light years away from that of Palombelli. “I want to tell who I am,” Barbara says at one point, recalling her childhood spent in front of the television watching Sanremo, with her father who dreamed of a future for her like Gigliola Cinquetti, “married, with a string of pearls.”

But she wanted to go out because she was one “Rebellious girl” and went “in search of emotions” because, according to his reconstruction, in the sixties there were no drugs and everyone was looking for excitement – walking on ledges, “playing with a gun like Tenco.”

«I had to rebel, but study hard to win my father’s esteem and freedom. So when I was 15 I started working and since then I have never stopped »continues Palombelli, arriving at that part of the story that reaches the seventies, years of struggle and rights to be conquered. «You, girls, have found rights already done, we have had to build them. Now it’s up to you to defend them, but with the determined smile you have. We must always rebel, we will never go well: they will humiliate us, we will never be perfect, we will never go well with husbands, fathers, brothers. We must not give up even if the price is very high ».

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The final invitation is, therefore, only one: “Study to tears and work until independence”. Too bad that shortly before, Palombelli had addressed the women of today as those who hold the country together only because “they keep schools open through tablets, keep families quiet and look after people who have positivity.” It is very difficult to take his words for good in a reality, that of today, which is very different from what he describes and the first to recognize it are the commentators on the Internet. “Run, go towards the future,” Palombelli finally says, without anyone being able to accept her words with perplexity or jubilation. For once the public at the Ariston would have told us something more about the hot reaction of certain monologues.

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