Singer, composer, Giovanna Marini embodied the passion of the folk movement of the 1960s. Of her country, Italy, whose cheerfulness she loved as much as she loathed the devastating capitalism of Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023), she said that it was brilliantly contradictory: “The starlets can be Guevarists, and the communist shepherds can sing the Passion of Christ. » Classical guitarist, feminist, volcanic, funny, Giovanna Marini died in Rome on Wednesday May 8. She was 87 years old.
Read the portrait (in 2010): Giovanna Marini, the voice of popular singing
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Throughout her life, she explored the canto radicato, “rooted singing”, complex polyphonies or partisan songs drawn from Puglia to Lombardy. From this corpus where red flags, anarchist resistances fly, as well as lullabies and funeral vigils, Giovanna Marini has built a profuse body of work. Activist ” red “, woman in the field, founder of the Scuola popolare di musica di Testaccio, in Rome, she was popular and learned. Setting off with the playwright Pippo Delbono in the footsteps of E Zezi, a group of worker singers from the Alfasud automobile factory in Naples, did not prevent him from teaching applied ethnology in Paris-VIII (Saint-Denis).
Born in Rome on January 19, 1937, into a bourgeois family, Giovanna Salviucci, who became Marini after marrying a nuclear physicist, was the daughter of a classical musician, “a little cursed, through the family condemnation of his non-consonant music”, she confided to World in 1979. In this very sheltered childhood, she had, she continued, “invented a Calabria, that of [son] maternal grandfather, philosopher by vocation who superbly despised work”. She learned classical guitar with Andres Segovia (1893-1987) and continued her training at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome.
Songs of working Italy
In 1958, she met Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) “in an evening of intelligent Rome”, where she played Bach for the gallery. He tells him : “Songs are not found in books”singing a popular song from Friuli, then Bella ciao. She thus discovers the world of mondine, rice field workers, the first organized women’s group, led by the voice of Giovanna Daffini (1914-1969). Passionate and now a close friend of the filmmaker, she joined Il Nuovo Canzoniere italiano, founded in Bologna by the ethnomusicologist Roberto Leydi (1928-2003). Together, they created the label I Dischi del sole, which became Bella ciao! after the success of the show of the same name staged in 1964 at the Festival of the Two Worlds of Spoleto – the troupe, which would then work with the writer and playwright Dario Fo (1926-2016), will be the subject of a complaint for infringement of the honor of the armed forces.
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