On Thursday, February 19th, at 6:00 PM, the Palazzo dei Congressi in Muralto will host a meeting dedicated to one of the most complex and mature chapters in Fabrizio De André's oeuvre. The initiative, promoted by the Dante Alighieri Society of Locarno, offers a reflection on the creative work that led to the birth of Souls saved, the latest album by the Genoese singer-songwriter, released in 1996.
The title of the conference – Fabrizio De André's "Anime Salve." How a Singer-Songwriter Works – clarifies the event's focus: not a celebratory homage, but an analysis of the compositional process, observed in its concrete form. This occasion places Fabrizio De André in Lugano and within the cultural context of Italian-speaking Switzerland, with a focus that prioritizes method and writing over myth.
The focus of the meeting is the collaboration between De André and Ivano Fossati, who together created an album considered by many to be an extreme synthesis of the artist's poetics. Following the traces left in the materials preserved by the Fabrizio De André Archive, the conference retraces the various stages of developing the songs: from the first notes, often born from reading a book or from scattered notes in notebooks, to the final versions of the lyrics.
The focus is on the variations, corrections, and rethinking that accompany songwriting. This work allows for a close-up look at how a musical text takes shape and how words and music are progressively refined, in a constant dialogue between literary inspiration and formal construction.
Leading the analysis will be Jan Gaggetta, a scholar who has dedicated his work to Souls saved a doctoral thesis defended in 2023, after an academic training between the universities of Fribourg and Siena. Currently a postdoctoral researcher atUniversity of VeronaGaggetta is engaged in a research project on Andrea Zanzotto's latest poetry collections, but his studies also include attention to the dialect poetry of Italian-speaking Switzerland, with investigations into Elio Scamara from Verzasca.
The speaker's profile helps position the conference within a context that intertwines philology, literary criticism, and songwriting studies, transcending the boundaries between popular music and academic research. In this sense, the Muralto event aims to be a moment of in-depth study, open to a broad audience yet grounded in solid documentary evidence.
Admission to the conference is free, confirming the organizers' desire to encourage participation and the circulation of knowledge. This initiative, through Souls saved, brings the craftsmanship of writing back to the center and offers a new perspective on Fabrizio De André in Lugano, far from simplifications and closer, instead, to the papers, the words and the time needed to construct a song.
