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Italian

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Rosa Balistreri ‘ I am not a singer, I am an activist with guitar’

Rosa Balistreri (1927–1990) was the indomitable voice of Sicily—hoarse, urgent, and incandescent with the stories of the island’s working poor. Born in Licata to a carpenter father and a housewife mother, she grew up without schooling, sent to menial work as a child. At sixteen she entered an arranged marriage with Gioacchino Torregrossa; when he gambled away their daughter Angela’s dowry, Rosa attempted to kill him. He did not die; […]

October 4, 2025 30 3

General

Lucio Dalla: The Astronaut Who Played Clarinet in the Alley

Lucio Dalla looked like your eccentric uncle—the one who reads Rimbaud in dialect and believes jellyfish are psychic. He wore fisherman’s caps and round glasses like he was both blind prophet and jazz pirate. But behind that disarming appearance was one of Italy’s most unclassifiable musical minds: part chanson, part prog, part street ballad, part prayer. He didn’t write songs. He built them like strange, little cities—populated with time travelers, […]

July 10, 2025 36

General

Mina: The Voice That Disappeared but Never Left

If the gods of pop decided to whisper secrets into human ears, they’d probably sound a bit like Mina. To call Mina just a singer is like calling the Colosseum just a pile of rocks. This woman didn't just dominate the Italian charts for decades—she redefined what it meant to have a voice, a face, and then, gloriously, no face at all. That’s right. In 1978, she walked away from […]

June 21, 2025 46 3