Every year, for about a week, Italy stops.
Every year, in the second week of February, social media, newspapers, and even politicians in Italy seemingly stop concerning themselves with the topics they usually concern themselves with and turn their attention to a coastal city of about 53 thousand people in Liguria. For a week, all eyes are on the Ariston Theatre in Sanremo, where about thirty artists (the precise number depends on the year) compete each with a new song and with a cover of another song in a five-day music festival at the end of which various prizes are awarded, the most important one of which grants the recipient the possibility to represent Italy at the Eurovision.
Transmitted by the first channel of the State’s television, Sanremo is a social phenomenon that is difficultly understood by whoever has not repeatedly been exposed to it, but even our non-Italian readers who never heard of Sanremo likely noticed that something was a bit different than usual in the air this past week.
To give a basic overview, Sanremo is meant to be a representative mix of Italian society in its various stratification. That happens both through the artists that are selected to compete and through the in-between moments: every year, members of law enforcement agencies, intellectuals, athletes, and other public figures are invited to speak on stage. The result is a five-day marathon of music, fleeting controversies, exposure of different demographic groups to the favorite artists of the other ones, unlikely interactions between public figures who seemingly have nothing to do with each other, and just general chaos.
It is the kind of chaos that some abhor and dismiss as trashy and hypocritical, while others simply cannot wait to be absorbed by it. It is quite unlikely, though, to be indifferent to what happens on that stage: this year’s final, which took place on Saturday evening, reached a share of 74.1%, which means that almost three-quarters of all Italian households who turned on a TV on Saturday were tuned on Sanremo.
Traditionally, because it is deemed as an old, conservative setting in which any attempt by anyone to bring any theme perceived as disturbing or controversial on stage is automatically truncated, the songs that are typically associated with Sanremo are slow, substantively harmless love ballads, sometimes beautiful, often indistinguishable from one another. Thanks to a gradual rejuvenation of the festival, this is slowly changing: for the past few years, there has been an increasing variety in the types of songs that are brought forward and there is increasingly greater attention to socio-political messages: artists are increasingly using the massive spotlight they receive during the Sanremo week to pass on a message that transcends the moment, which was often not the case in the past.
This year more than ever I got the impression that Sanremo is an accurate lens to understand Italian society: its soul, its fears, its internal territorial rivalries, its demographic divisions, and its rich history (both ancient and recent) were all a part of this year’s edition. There was Dargen D’Amico’s song “Onda Alta” (High Wave) explicitly referencing the Mediterranean route of migration from northern Africa to southern Europe. There was Italian-Tunisian artist Ghali, who in his performance delicately but firmly brought forward his experience as a second-generation immigrant and explicitly said “stop the genocide” from the stage. There was rapper Geolier’s song almost fully in Neapolitan. Themes like feminism, social equality, discrimination in its various forms, were a part of various performances. There were younger and older artists alternating on stage, and in the evening dedicated to duets – in which each artist may invite some other artist not competing to perform a cover of another song or medley of songs – even singing together.
The winner, Angelina Mango, is in a way a perfect expression of all this: the 22-year-old daughter of one of the most respected Italian singers of the past few decades, the late Pino Mango, brought the uncharacteristic “La noia” (The boredom), upbeat, modern and catchy, but also performed her late father’s touching ballad “La rondine” (The swallow) which earned her a unanimous standing ovation. A winner that proves she can appeal to a younger, upbeat audience but also sustain the weight of an emotionally intense performance.
Sanremo is increasingly a polaroid of Italy’s sociopolitical state: increasingly, if you want to understand this beautiful, varied, often chaotic but always soulful country, Sanremo in the second week of February is a good place to start.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
