Ma se ghe penso

((Mario Cappello-Attilio Margutti) – Gilberto Govi - 1930

In 1925, Mario Cappello and Attilio Margutti wrote Ma se ghe penso. It became the protagonist of a musical event, the 'Festa della canzone genovese' (organized by the literary review "La Superba") held in Genoa in 1925. It proposed to make happen in the city of the Lanterna the same thing that had happened in Naples, Rome, Milan, and Florence: the birth of a modern song in dialect. It differed from the traditional folk songs, the ancient trallallero. So in some way, it was the song that paved the way for what would later become, for journalistic simplification, the so-called "Genoese school" of singer-songwriter’s works of the early 1960s. It is a song of nostalgia for one of the many Ligurians who emigrated to South America in the early 20th century, who left without a lira and managed, with huge sacrifices, to guarantee a dignified lifestyle for his family, to the extent that it is his son, now a naturalized South American, who tries to convince his father not to make the long trip to return to see his Genoa again. The song’s highly successful melodic line goes perfectly with the nostalgic quality of the memory, which traces the places of his youth - Righi, Piazza della Nunziata, la Foce, la Lanterna, la Cava, il Molo, the mountains in the background – which in the end convince the protagonist to travel to the town of his birth. It is only natural that the stellar song was later honoured by the great Genoese artists like Natalino Otto, Joe Sentieri, Bruno Lauzi, Gino Paoli and also the Ricchi & Poveri, in a beautiful harmonized version with four voices, and later the splendid version by Mina. The version you will hear is actually a spoken version, by the greatest Genoese actor of all time, Gilberto Govi. The innate musicality of that dialect is such that we hardly notice the fact that the verses of the song are not inflected in music but simply acted as if they were a theatrical script.