Gianna Nannini, when words rock

Gianna Nannini is just as you imagine her: tiny, scathing, a woman that truly rocks. Just as she is in her videos and her concerts.

Sitting in the chair, in Ville Ponti, to receive the “Words In Music” award, given by the Chiara Prize, she is also a woman who is conscious of her career, of great successes and of hard times, who is not afraid to remember, to experiment, she is not afraid of a life that could not have been different.

She has no difficulty admitting that she escaped from Siena, her home town, because it was too small, and her parents did not want her to sing, and that she preferred Milan to Rome, where she “first had to go to dinner, then to bed with someone” in order to get a contact.

Introduced by the journalist Vittorio Colombo, Enrico De Angeli, the Chairman of the Tenco Club, and Antonio Silva, the historic presenter of the Tenco Prize, Gianna spoke openly about herself, her very strong Tuscan roots, her support for the “Contrada dell’Oca”, “in that Siena Palio, which no anthropology book has been able to explain. The sound of the snare drum during the Palio is still the sound of my music,” she confessed.

And while “De Andrè needed the stories of others”, she prefers “to sing about emotions” in her songs, and collaborate with Isabella Santacroce, “because writers have a different vision, and that’s why I like them so much.”

The topics slip into the memories of great moments in her career, like her debut at the Tenco Prize, in 1983, with California, and her dissertation for her degree in Philosophy, and collaborations with great Italian and foreign artistes.

Gianna Nannini did nothing by chance, and her often courageous choices, were always made with a view to looking forward and experimenting. She was once fascinated by Janis Joplin, today, by rap.

It is not only her music, but also her social responsibility, with Greenpeace, her testimonial for the project of Giuseppe Tornatore, “Italy in a day”. “I like giving a testimonial, because if I say it, and someone loves me, that person thinks, ‘I could do the same’.”

Today she has received her second literary prize, after the one named after Elsa Morante, with the explanation that she “has managed to blend the art of the word with that of the gesture and that of music, for her constant commitment to defending human rights, the environment, and the value of tolerance.”