Remembering Giovanna Marini: The Voice of Italian Folk Song

"We will forever be grateful to Giovanna Marini, for her precious and also courageous research work. We lose an authentic storyteller," writes Angelo Branduardi among the many who bid farewell on social media to Giovanna Marini, who passed away today at the age of 87, summarizing the work and value of this artist. A composer, singer, researcher who dedicated her life to the oral tradition by founding the School of Popular Music of Testaccio in the 1970s, the first of its kind, which continues its activity even today. Who was Giovanna Marini Born in Rome (the city where she passed away) on January 19, 1937, in a family of musicians, she collaborated with the crème de la crème of Italian artists - from Calvino to Dario Fo - who sought to align highbrow and popular literature, which in the Italian tradition often went hand in hand. Graduated in guitar at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, she perfected her studies with Andres Segovia. In the early 1960s, Giovanna Marini came into contact with the major intellectuals and scholars of the Italian popular tradition, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Roberto Lydi, Gianni Bosio, and Diego Carpitella. In 1964 in Spoleto, she took part in the show Bella Ciao, causing scandal and indignant reactions from the audience. She is the founding core of the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, collaborates with the famous Sardinian language poet Peppino Marotto, from whom she learns the art of improvised popular narration, and is a cornerstone of the Istituto Ernesto De Martino, in which she collects the folk songs she discovered and cataloged. The Shows Among her shows, Ci ragiono e canto, directed by Dario Fo in 1965, Vi parlo dell'America, Chiesa Chiesa, and Eroe. In '74 she founded in Rome the Popular School of Testaccio. In 2002 with Francesco De Gregori she recorded the album Il fischio del vapore, making her name known to the general public after 40 years. In 2005 she composed the music for Le ceneri di Gramsci, on the text by Paolini, from which in 2006 the homonymous album was derived. A pillar of Italian music of the twentieth century, defined as the 'Italian Joan Baez', she brings back the value of folk song and its political value, bringing to light in a philological work the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano that she takes around theaters and squares of the peninsula. Important is the material collected in Salento between 1960 and the early seventies. Her research work earns her the chair of ethnomusicology. She collaborates with Marco Paolini for an opera on Ustica, remains in history her Lamento per Pasolini, her Trains for Reggio Calabria. In all these years she has written much music for theater and cinema: works directed by Attilio Corsini, Marco Mattolini (La donna ragno, L'ècole des femmes, Funerale, Pentesilea, Robinson Crusoe mercante di York, Nora Helmer, direction by Carlo Quartucci), Fabbrica by Ascanio Celestini; for cinema: all the works of Citto Maselli starting from '67 (Lettera aperta a un giornale della sera, Storia d'amore, Il sospetto, I sei operai, L'alba, Avventura di un fotografo, Codice privato, Il segreto, Cronache del terzo millennio), Café Express by Nanni Loy, Terminal by Paolo Breccia, Teresa Raquin by Giancarlo Cobelli, and others. In 2016 her music was the soundtrack to the documentary Un paese di Calabria focused on the story of the town of Riace. Her 'Bella ciao' sung in the heart of Garbatella, soundtrack of April 25, 2023.