Genova per noi – Live

Genoa for us
Author: Paolo Conte

A classic of modern Italian song. The piece was recorded as a single by Bruno Lauzi in 1975 and reached number eleven in the charts shortly before being included in the album of the same name. Its public and critical success also led the author to record it at the end of the same year on the album Paolo Conte and that remains - without taking anything away from Lauzi’s performance - the “definitive” and best-loved version of Genova per noi, which Conte performed again live on two albums (Concerti and Live Arena di Verona). The text is a little elegy for the Ligurian capital from the point of view of those who come from an inland province (Asti) and breathe in its scents, feel its moods and are amazed by the sight of the sea: in hindsight, the perspective is the one seen by those who exit the motorway tunnel to face the sea, accompanied by the new bridge by Renzo Piano.

“At least until my entire generation,” wrote Conte, “the majority of the Piedmontese showed a hesitant character and great difficulty speaking the Italian language decently, so that meeting strangers was embarrassing. A certain rough behaviour in a large part of the neighbouring Ligurian population basically meant avoiding some of that embarrassment (...) But traveling toward Genoa, along the way those Piedmontese felt their habitual, still and unchangeable landscape (vertical water, rain) slipping away, and felt the turmoil and surprise of moving into another different mobile landscape (horizontal water, sea) (...) smelling the air with its oriental hints and, for them, unexpected ambiguities, then, wanting to go home, yet happy to have been as if swept into another existence for a day.”