Author: Lucio Toth

An Oscar returned” This is how the newspapers these days are defining the sentence that recognizes the Istrian singer-songwriter Sergio Endrigo as the author of the Oscar-winning soundtrack for the 1996 film “Il Postino” by Michael Radford, based on the work by Pablo Neruda, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian cinematography. But do we need court rulings to bring back to networks, newspapers, and screens the face and voice of one of the singer-songwriters who have marked the history of the most beautiful decades of Italian song? Endrigo was not only the singer of the disillusionment of life, a sign of twentieth-century Western culture (“If things are like this… there is nothing more to say between us…) and of love that asks nothing more than what a love can give (“Teresa, when I gave you the first kiss… on the mouth… Teresa, I don’t have to forgive you anything, absolutely nothing… what you give me is enough for me…”) Isn’t that little bit of love and harsh, bitter happiness that we feel when we return to look at the sun from the shores of Pola, Lussino, Rovigno, Zara? Endrigo also sang about the children's desire for the future: "To make a tree you need a flower..." From this year, the children of the new Italian kindergarten in Zara will also be singing it, sitting in a circle in the school garden! “And if I come back, I come back with the flower. Long live love, long live freedom!” But Sergio taught all of us exiles that even nostalgia for things lost, or never had, is an invitation to look forward and push away the ghosts of violence, indifference, and hatred. The note of Exodus is dominant in his poetry. Because “It will leave, the ship will leave…Where will it arrive? This is not known…” doesn’t it remind us of the “Toscana” that sets sail from Pola? And our people scattered across all continents by the wave of the Exodus? Until the little-known “1947”. “How I wish I were a tree that knows where it is born and where it will die.” We too have never found the “flowery road of youth.” But in all his songs the presence of the sea, which pushes memories, desires and illusions back towards the shore, is always dominant: “Stones, which the sea has consumed are my words of love for you…” How can we not recognize in those “stones” the pebbles that, in the clear water of our bays, our children's feet have trampled? And in those words the distant echo of our reproach to a motherland that did not listen to us? “Nor will I ever again touch the sacred shores where my little boy's body lay…” Our fellow Greek-Dalmatian, Ugo Foscolo, had left us a century earlier, as evidence of a thirst for return that no source can quench. “Where to go back?” Fulvio Tomizza will ask himself. But perhaps the most evocative song is the one with the verses of Rafael Alberti: “S'equivocò la paloma, se equivocaba… / Creyò che el mar era el cielo / que la noche la mañana....” It contains a disturbing existential and also political question. How many of us, men of the twentieth century, have mistaken the sea for the sky and the night for the morning, like the dove of Alberti and Endrigo? From Guadalajara to Goli Otok. If a psychological motivation, with some rationality, can be sought in this oblivion of our media, and of RAI in particular, for a young man who has given so much to the "bel canto" of our Italy, it can be found in two, bitterly competing reasons. Unlike other Italian singer-songwriters, Endrigo does not have a sufficient “territory” to belong to, his own people who cultivate his memory. Only the Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian exiles and the compatriots who remained in our lands of origin. What is Istria for the vast majority of Italians? Even if Alida Valli and Gandusio or the Grammatica sisters were born there, or athletes who have carried the tricolour high on all the podiums in the world (Nino Benvenuti, Irene Camber, Abdon Pamich, etc.)? And musicians like Uto Ughi? Or a Lidia Bastianich, who imposed Italian cuisine in restaurants in the States, she is Istrian and a “refugee”?  Anything. And Dalmatia? Just a country of distracted holidays in Trogir or Dubrovnik. Forgetting that men and women like Ottavio Missoni and Mila Scőn were born here, who brought Made in Italy to the catwalks of all continents, remembering their Traù and their Ragusa that no one calls that anymore. The second reason is even more bitter and lacerating, Endrigo was a “left-wing” man. He attended the Unity Festivals. Ohibò! And then we exiles, who were generally not left-wing, did not hold him dear, as a son of our land. We also misunderstood him, because Alberti and Neruda were also left-wing. Forgetting that poetry and music have no ideological boundaries. They are the voice of the soul, whether they are called D'Annunzio or Garcia Lorca, Drieu La Rochelle or Cesare Pavese.