L 'last night I am awakened by a noise is a pigeon that knocks insistently at the window. I get up and just open it, the bird, looking very serious, he pulls out a pencil from behind his ear, it gives me a form to sign, deliver a telegram and went away without even saying goodbye. 
L 'other day I get a phone call: " Two folders on travel and music. Now. And they are written in an understandable way, " an intimate voice with a strange accent, posing as an emissary of this here newspaper. Closed the call, I immediately sought solace in solitary shameful vice: reading. In this case, "The right to laziness" by Paul Lafargue, a move that he wrote about a century ago. Some days I just start with the wrong foot.
And given that misfortunes never come alone, in the afternoon to visit a neighbor who has since made two weeks in Sharm - as he puts it - which then would be a popular tourist destination in Egypt, wants to do know the entire building. The type, one that when they leave shall maintain coffee maker, coffee and camp stove, greets newly arrived, placed two balls, loosen as souvenirs bought a cd there and is about to pull out cell-phone to show pictures of the ritual, when a call comes. Ringer disastrous, needless to say. " What?" Suspicious do I just see the cover of the cd. " do not know, I have not even heard. Imagine, then with this cover. There is a trick that seems to bust through my aunt. By the way, I met in Sharm American boys that I have shot in the complete discography mp3 Metallica. Interests you? " tells me the building, answering the phone at the same time. I take the ferry to the distraction to his doorway and out, to do with it without realizing it, make it disappear into the elevator. Stuff that even Harry Potter, kids.
apparition remained the record, I looked dumb. I say silent because while the writing was in Arabic, then because there were only two tracks, each lasting from thirty to fifty minutes. Too much effort: I took the cd and threw it near the cat litter.
few days after passing a friend from home, when a traveler wants to taste everything: if it is kibble alligator in the swamps of Florida or camel chops if he goes to Palermo in Tunisia. Just entered, greeting goes to the cat that is in the area and bisognini, with hawk eyes, sees the so-called Egyptian abandoned. "But this is Umm Kalthoum, the Diva! exclaims. What makes us close to the cat litter? " added with a light in his eyes that does not bode well. There are certain times, as everyone knows, but we would sink into the earth, coward, refuses to swallow. In a nanosecond the CD was recovered, cleaned and in silence, put on your stereo. The girl was now sitting, but he kept staring at me and meanwhile beat his foot nervously.
As it was, as it was, the two tracks ended. I did not understand anything. Nothing to do with any of the first thirty discs that can pass through the head. Nothing can be coordinated on a journey that did not provide nessun villaggio turistico. L'unica cosa che riconoscevo erano le urla e gli applausi del pubblico, uguali a quelli che possiamo ascoltare durante un concerto rock. Tumulti incomprensibili, alle orecchie dell'ascoltatore occidentale medio. Figuriamoci poi la musica: nessun accordo, melodie continue con note che non erano mai perfette e parole cantate in una lingua incomprensibile.
“Cos'è?” chiedo per la seconda volta. Lei, dopo avermi visto annaspare per quasi ottanta minuti, ora si è ammorbidita: “ E' Umm Kalthoum, una piccola contadina nata in un villaggio sul Delta del Nilo agli inizi del secolo scorso. Una che, dagli anni venti fino a tuttora, Thirty years after his death, continues to be the voice of fifty million Arabs from the Gulf Ocean. The Star of the East, called - continued -. A cross between Maria Callas, The Beatles, Eminem, Mozart, Rolling Stones ". " And Metallica?" ask. "You often too your neighbor, that does not travel without coffee." "Look at me got himself . " certainly will not even listen . The cat nodded, rubbing on her leg.
" What is a tourist! - has taken her - One who seeks spaghetti in Peru and then complain if they are overcooked. To listen to this music, all music, you have to be travelers. And raise your head from your fence. Only the best news is that now a group that sounds like another thirty years ago and dresses like a twenty years before. " "A morgue, virtually" , I add. The final bars are always good to me.
"And then - he concluded - try asking for a Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Palestinian, if he knows Umm Kalthoum. You will see it immediately smile, as if for a moment he returned home. When submitting its radio concerts, first Thursday of every month, the entire Arab world stopped to listen, and everyone dreams with his music. There is a book which tells of a poet in love with her. It's called 'I loved you for your voice'. You know him? "
No, did not know him. But I immediately thought of a story, about this CD: a man arrives on a beach. It 's definitely a shipwrecked, naked and exhausted. What to do? We call the police, or the Red Cross, or the ER. A girl of ten thousand years ago called the maids instead: "You have to help him, because they all come from Zeus, foreigners and beggars." And then they take it into parents' home, feeds him, washes him, and it smells when it is covered with white cloths and clean they do sit together and all ask him to tell a story. Except that she was called Nausicaa, Odysseus and his time there was the Bossi-Fini and who are thrown back into the sea of \u200b\u200bforeigners. " What has the Bossi-Fini?" she said absently, looking at the navel.
"The other, when you do not know, it makes you scared. As this disc "I had to respond. Just give me a tone that I shot there the first thing that came into his head: "Music is a travel, and travel must be curious, open to differences, and be able to bring home what you find, to understand, compare, improve ". "Bravo -fa- she might write an article. But do it in an understandable way. "
" I if I were a boy, brings you the guitar. Follows him everywhere. I feel like singing squares, I would see laborers moved, excited, and give him hope he sings, "writes Ignazio Buttitta Pino Veneziano, calling it" a storyteller who makes policy, and with sublime poetry.
Others, such as Ascanio Celestini, would say that Venice is "one of those singers, artists oral culture that in some countries, such as the United States of America, would become a cult object, a bit 'like Woodie Guthrie or fathers of the blues. " Only that Pino was born in Riesi, in the Sicilian-thirties, and would have revealed the existence of America only a few years later, perhaps when a boy herding goats in the countryside of Sciacca, or did the baker's boy to Castelvetrano. Or when he moved to Trapani, in a seaside village, where this story begins.
Lido Azzurro in Marinella di Selinunte, in the seventies, was a place dove, dopo aver mangiato e bevuto, si potevano ascoltare canzoni dal “parlare naturale”: quelle di Pino Veneziano che, dopo aver servito ai tavoli, in certe serate tirava fuori la chitarra. Tra i clienti, oltre a scrittori, giornalisti, artisti di ogni parte del mondo, poteva capitare di incontrare Danilo Dolci, Primo Levi, Fabrizio De Andrè. Il quale, dopo averlo ascoltato, invitò Pino ad aprire il suo primo concerto in Sicilia, nel 1975 a Marsala.
Una volta, in quel posto arrivò anche Jorge Luis Borges; ad accompagnare il poeta c'era il fotografo Ferdinando Scianna che scattò Photo of the meeting. In a Borges is smiling in the foreground and a light in his eyes like a blind man. Behind Pino Veneziano is singing his songs, as he did with friends and clients. At the end of that meeting the poet, says Umberto Leone, wanted to touch his face, "Pino had a face like a gypsy that seemed carved from south-west and the south wind, Borges plumb it to him slowly, barely touching her, to understand every curve, every furrow that had dug that flight. It was a scene of great emotion. "
Marinella di Selinunte, in those years was the focus of many people and many passions. It was therefore natural that, attracted by the sea, from the temples and also by the Sardinian restaurant Don Pino, competed in beauty with the temple of Hera few hundred meters away, the Blue Beach could become, for a certain period of time and a conjunction of time and space that only distracted when they call, in a sort of magnetic center.
Pino Veneziano, from speaking natural
One day in 1972, a musician passing gave him a guitar, "Pino took her hand as if he had lost their entire life," recalls Jojo, his friend and partner in the restaurant and Veneziano, forty years, he learned to play it.
not Arcadia but Sicily, between the sea and the countryside of Castelvetrano, a country where a few years earlier had been murdered Salvatore Giuliano, not far from Cinisi Peppino Impastato or Trapani Mauro Rostagno. These were the years of the barracks in Belice earthquakes, protest marches, and massacres of the Democratic regime of State.
In his songs, sung in Sicilian dialect with a dark voice and old, using attacks and almost spoken storyteller, there are the struggles of the seventies, died on the job, the bomb Piazza della Loggia, the pollution of Gela, the progress "has lengthened the pitch and fool that I'm going below." The invitation to do this, in every land, a garden.
But not only are his songs that sing of the sweetness of September, the beauty of nature, love, cats in heat and whores.
Veneziano embraces the guitar as a sheet of paper on which to write the words of a man "or crazy or criminal, but by speaking naturally." Speaking of "poor" innocent, poor, migrants, exploited.
It becomes, Pino's guitar, an instrument with which to send fascist fuck, priests and masters "son of a bitch and whore mother" shouting "We want all that is ours! Yours? I'll leave! So much nothing. "
His only album, recorded in less than a thousand copies in 1975 for October circles of Lotta Continua, is called "Lu Patruno and suvecchiu", "the owner is too much."
Twelve songs for little more than thirty-five minutes, to hear them now, still shaking, strong, true, dry. Natural essential to a man. Pino, thanks to that gift, he had become what he had always been: a poet who told stories that no one else could see, turning them into poetry in song.
of this land let's make a garden
who died in 1994 when his guitar in recent years had begun to forget, gathering dust and some rope was broken - in addition to its single disc, Pino Veneziano also left half signs that you can see in people who have known him, recognized the passion that is released as a tattoo can be worn with pride.
A Castelvetrano's Association "Pino Veneziano (www.pinoveneziano.it), for example, that over six years to organize the Award intitolato a Pino, porta avanti idee e proposte culturali e sociali; e il nome di Veneziano diventa così, come è anche giusto che sia, mezzo, non soltanto fine.
Solo che da diversi anni questo, che è anche il territorio del boss mafioso Matteo Messina Denaro, è “offeso dal tentativo di cementificazione incombente e reclama il diritto a essere quello che è, un'oasi di pace e di cultura” come dicono alcuni suoi abitanti, in un appello per Selinunte promosso dall'Associazione, firmato da scrittori, musicisti, intellettuali, cittadini e diffuso in occasione della sesta edizione del Premio, assieme ad un libro/tributo su Pino Veneziano e ad un cd dal title of "let's make this earth a garden." In the book, among others, the writings of Vincenzo Consolo, Ascanio Celestini. Ignazio Buttitta, Gaetano Savatteri. Among the musicians who participated in the cd playing covers of Venice, as well as those who attended the concert, Peppe Barra, Moni Ovadia, Mondorchestra, Gabriele Rampino, Roy Paci, Officina Zoe, Sud Sound System.
The tribute concert
It's a little 'effect to hear the songs of Pino Veneziano, born between the plastic tablecloths and the smell of fried fish for his restaurant on the sea, carried out in an August evening in the Archaeological Park of Selinunte in the temple of Hera, Goddess who welcomes us with the embrace warmth of his columns, the background of this outdoor concert. The air smells of thyme, wild parsley, oregano and on our right, in an African sky, the little wagon. All around, a thick bubble humidity envelops us drowning in sweat and liquefying instruments, musicians, audience, plastic chairs and sacred groves.
The sixth edition of the Pino Veneziano opens with a speech reminiscent of Vincenzo Consolo Vincenzo Tusa, archaeologist from the heart of peasant, turning in grave robbers and guards managed to make it to expropriate the land mafia, has created what is the Archaeological Park of Selinunte. The following is a remembrance and a tribute for Gianni Diecidue, poet and agitator libertarian who died recently.
Among the musicians on the bill, even Roy Paci. But, because of a cat met on a bus, causing something akin to an anaphylactic shock, put him offside, the Paci - allergic to cat fur-awaited by all in flesh and trumpet, it was shown on the phone instead of wings Mercury. That is a our mobile phone which he communicated with the audience, apologizing for the absence, thanking those who had invited him and telling the owner of the cat, animal incorruptible, his grievances had sent him to that country in a bad way. Roy has quietly concluded his speech by pointing to a recipe of my knowledge that, due to interference in the reception, did not understand what kind of animal it meant. Of course, cooked with olives and celery: like the rabbit, but not quite.
then appeared on stage is Pino Masi. "And where this check?" Has now asked a man sitting a few rows ahead. "It must have been some unexpected materialization. Time machines are no longer used to be, "he replied absently daughter sitting beside a brat who had not stopped fiddling with the play station all the time of the call and they forgot to Greek temples, music and musicians.
Michela Musolino opens his show playing beautifully a cappella, "A Santu" and after that, some other song from her CD "Songs of Trinacria." Work where the Italian-American singer, thanks to the lightness in the arrangements and her beautiful voice, knows how to remove the shawls blacks, the cypresses and the polls that some misunderstanding-think-should be required reading in all of popular music and of Sicilian Rosa Balistreri in particular.
Then the resounding Umberto Leone, that when one gets on stage to sing as if he had just kissed a nymph in the mouth of a sudden, there among the olive trees.
And again, the Palermo Art Ensemble of musicians who accompanied the singers, Rocco Pollina with some guys of the band of the Master of Asaro Paceco that prefaces his reading of "The Mafia does not exist" by voice of Toto Riina who complains of essere vittima dei comunisti; una applauditissima Clara Salvo accompagnata da Matilde Politi, quest'ultima purtroppo in sordina per scelte della scaletta; Pippo Pollina, Etta Scollo e, sorpresa della serata, Enrico Stassi.
Il quale, con la sua definitiva rilettura di Tom Waits, mischiando l'Orco di Pomona con il Trionfo di Santa Rosalia, usa il dialetto siciliano e le abbanniate come centro dal quale partire: Ucciria, Santuzza e panino cu la stigghiola come riferimenti emozionali e geografici. Il tutto per la necessaria comprensione della poetica di Tom Waits, chiaro. E laddove tutte queste cose non fossero vere, come potrebbe anche essere, la mitica interpretazione di Enrico Stassi rimane in ogni caso una delle cose divertenti di questa serata.
Nel dopoconcerto alla “Zabbarra”, la trattoria sul mare, Pino Masi fa una considerazione: “bisogna morire per essere ricordati”. Vero: non tutti hanno la fortuna di morire al momento giusto e, a volerla dire com'è, alcuni sopravvivono dannosamente a se stessi. Nel frattempo, dopo che tutti chissà per quale suggestione avevano evitato il coniglio con le olive e sedano, arrivano le sarde arrosto di Jojò: standing ovation.
“Come these sardines from the next table takes a customer casually replying to Masi. "Presbyopia is called" cut short a brat - always the same - sitting nearby, without even looking up from his play station and they forgot all : sardines, cats and rabbits.
