Antonio "Antonello" Venditti (born 8 March 1949) is an Italian singer-songwriter and pianist who became popular in the 1970s for the social themes addressed in his songs.
Biography
Antonello Venditti was born in Rome, the son of Vincenzino Italo Venditti from Campolieto, in Molise, who at the time was deputy-prefect in Rome, and Wanda Sicardi.
He studied piano in his youth and made his debut in the music world in the early 1970s at the Folkstudio in Rome, together with singers like Francesco De Gregori, Mimmo Locasciulli, Grazia Di Michele and Giorgio Lo Cascio. De Gregori and Venditti formed a duo and together they released their first album, Theorius Campus, in 1972. The LP enjoyed limited commercial success, but showcased Venditti's powerful voice and talent for addressing social issues. This is particularly evident in pieces like "Sora Rosa", sung in Roman dialect. Also in semi-dialect was "Roma Capoccia", a vernacular translation of the Latin expression "Roma Caput mundi" intended as a declaration of love for Venditti's hometown, which later became one of his most famous songs. Curiously, Venditti refused to sing it for several years, as he considered it not politically or socially "engaged" enough.
Venditti and De Gregori subsequently parted ways. Venditti moved to Milan in 1973 and released his first solo labum L'orso bruno, made in collaboration with musician Vince Tempera; this album included another song in dialect, "E li ponti so' soli", but otherwise was marked by an even stronger attention to social themes. His next work, Le cose della vita ("Things of Our Life"), released the same year for RCA Music, confirmed this tendency. The following LP Quando verrà Natale ("When Christmas Comes") was similar; its minimal arrangements emphasize the strength of Venditti's denunciation.
After a live performance of the song "A Cristo" ("To Christ"), Venditti was denounced by an Italian police officer for blasphemy. He was later acquitted. Although Venditti's use of religious language was not typical of the left-wing culture he adhered to, his lifestyle in the late 1960s and the 1970s was, as he later told the journalist Giampaolo Mattei, "secular": "They were years in which the influence of the left was really strong and the life of young people then was somewhat Godless. I think it was the everyday life of the time that led me to participate in and embrace certain things. I emerged from that when I realised it was a dead end because it took away people's joy. Maybe it did give them social growth, but it had nothing to say about happiness. Too much materialism and too little spirituality. A whole generation grew up with that materialism, supported by political slogans."
Venditti's fortunes grew and peaked in 1975, with the LP Lilly. The yearning title-track was another strong accusation, this time against drugs, and achieved an outstanding success. Other popular pieces in the album were "Compagno di scuola" ("Schoolmate") and the long ballad "Lo stambecco ferito" ("The Wounded Ibex"), the story of a corrupt Northern Italian tycoon. Venditti continued to deal with front-page matters in his next LP, Ullàlla (1976), whose "Canzone per Seveso" was about the industrial accident in July that year.
Political involvement, however, had side-effects on Venditti's inspiration in the late 1970s, marked in Italy by the growing menace of terrorism and by the strategia della tensione: some events (like the public booing of his friend De Gregori by politicized fans during a show) forced him to rethink his way of being a public personality. Sotto il segno dei pesci ("(Born) Under Pisces", 1978) contained more personal and intimate themes. The eponymous track scored a great success, but was largely misinterpreted as a love song: it actually referred to Venditti's career, as he was in fact born "under the Pisces sign".
Success was, however, marred by his divorce from his wife Simona Izzo. She won custody of Venditti's son, Francesco Venditti. The following LP, Buona domenica (1979), was strongly marked by this difficult period. It contained, however, several classics, like the title-track and the ballad Modena, which featured Gato Barbieri on saxophone and is considered one of Venditti's finest works.