Si può dare di più

In 1987, you won Sanremo with Tozzi and Morandi…

It all began with the Nazionali Cantanti, who at that time were able to help you form friendships with people with whom you would otherwise have had nothing to share, from an artistic point of view: many collaborations started there. And I, who have always been a little Manichaean about these things, and had always considered Italian music to be second rate melodic music, became gradually more willing. I softened up. Also because Tozzi, tied to the summer hits Ti amo and Gloria, started talking to us and I found out that he’s nice. He’s a solid musician and not a sinister exploiter of the audience as I may have thought at the time of the Decibels. But then there was another thing that gave me the decisive push: when ENRICO VIII came out, the press, and particularly the Roman press, praised me as a songwriter, but criticized my way of singing, first for my Milanese accent, deemed excessive, and then for my vocal range: this thing had bothered me, so when I listened for the first time to Si può dare di più, I thought it could be the right song for me to test myself in that area where I’d been thought weak. And so, it became intriguing for me.

Given how these things work, it’s odd that you didn’t take advantage of that hit by touring together…

We were too pure. We were afraid of getting dirty: we already imagined our respective managers fighting each other over us, then the record companies were on our case and were pushing, and this slowed us down. Today what I’m saying is laughable. One does everything, the video, the tour, the DVD, and then the Christmas re-release… Sometimes, when we were going around promoting it, we talked about it and jokingly, Umberto said he would like to sing Il mare d’inverno, while I wanted to sing his Dimentica dimentica… Anyway yes, from an entrepreneurial point of view it was really madness not to do a tour together at that time.

Excerpt from: Vita, Vito, La via enrouge: Interview with Enrico Ruggeri, in: “Vinile”, No. 19, 2019, pp. 80-81