Italian Protest Singers of the late 1960s and 1970s 1: Paolo Pietrangeli

In my previous post on social and political documentary film of the 1970s I mentioned the name of Paolo Pietrangeli who made a documentary on the Italian neo-fascist movement Bianco e Nero. Pietrangeli in fact worked with some very well-known directors such as Mauro Bolognini for the film L'Assoluto Naturale (1969), Lucchino Visconti in Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) (1971) Federico Fellini for the film Roma (1972). Two years later he worked with Paul Morrissey in two films inspired by Andy Warhol : Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. (This was the same year he made his documentary expose of the world of Italian neo-fascism). In 1977 he films Porci con le ali (Pigs Have Wings) entered into the Berlin Film festival but sequestered by Italian censors. 

And yet Pietrangeli is not mainly known for his films but certain songs of his which became symbols of the revolts and rebellions of the 1970s. Perhaps the most symbolic song was his Contessa (Countess). The song begins with the words of someone (her friend?) telling the countess of how some workers started a strike to increase their pay and were bloodily beaten by the police. He or she laments that the workers' blood has dirtied the doors and the courtyard and who knows how long it will take to clean up. 

At which point the song turns into a call to arms for those exploited:

Compagni, dai campi e dalle officine
prendete la falce, portate il martello,
scendete giù in piazza, picchiate con quello,
scendete giù in piazza, affossate il sistema.

Comrades from the fields and the shopfloors
Take up your sickle, bring your hammers
Go down to the squares, fight with them
Go down to the square, bury the system.

The next lines are directed to the countess from the workers telling them that if this is the price they expect the exploited to pay then they will have no peace. If this is the price, they say, we want war and wish to see you below ground. If this is the price that we've paid then no one shall be exploited ever again. The next verse returns to the countess and her friend speaking with social disgust at the sons of workers with ideas above their station and how during the occupation (of the university?) people are practising free love. People have no morals anymore, Countess is the lament.

We then hear the next rousing verse directed towards the rebels:

Se il vento fischiava ora fischia più forte
le idee di rivolta non sono mai morte;
se c'è chi lo afferma non state a sentire,
è uno che vuole soltanto tradire;
se c'è chi lo afferma sputategli addosso,
la bandiera rossa ha gettato in un fosso. 

If the wind whistled, now it whistles even stronger (a reference to a Partisans' song based on the Soviet war song Katiusha)
The ideas of revolt have never died
If someone tells you so, don't listen to him
He wants only to betray us;
If someone tells you so spit at him
he has thrown the red flag in a ditch.

We return once more to the verse telling the countess that at this price they will have no peace etc. More recently Modena City Ramblers have made a new version of this symbolic song (inspired partly by music from The Pogues as well as Pietrangeli's lyrics).

Pietrangeli was well-known for other songs. One is his song about the demonstration in Via Giulia in 1968. Pier Paolo Pasolini was to shock the Italian Left by stating his empathy for (what he saw as) the working class police rather than the sons of bourgeois students. Pietrangeli, however, sees this event as a simple matter of state repression against students who held their own. 

Some of Pietrangeli's songs are radical (and some might say extremist) in a way that one would find it hard to imagine today. One of these (from 1969) is entitled Mio Caro Padrone Domani Ti Sparo (My Dear Boss. Tomorrow I'm Going to Shoot You) with some wonderfully (or outrageously?) grotesque lines of what he intends to do with his boss - one of them states "I'll make donkey's soap from your skin". Here's the song: Another has Pietrangeli imagining a certain herb (la lallera) which would change street names so that Corso Umberto would turn into Karl Marx Strasse and the biggest street there was would turn into Lenin Allee.