On TV, they sometimes take us back in time with the nostalgia of old movies, where “the poor but beautiful” have mini briefs, striped sandals and sculpted physique. The girls have violent lipstick, lush body, chubby face, long hair and swollen breasts. The youth of the 50s were still full of hope; the 60s, with their conscience and morals, were yet to come. That generation just wanted to forget the bad memories of the previous decade.
The evocative power of those films is extraordinary. Women in long skirts and men in baggy trousers aboard Fiat or riding Vespas, they are all sudden flashes that give concrete light to illusions never consumed. They are memories of provincial and parochial Italy that was frantically building its new industrial reality. Those films are like yellowed photographs, like old magazines used to recompose a mosaic that the dust of time had slowly erased. That world appears silent, cemetery, like an old film without sound. It is only the voices, the noises, the music of that season that manage to give vitality and depth to this museum.
And the voices, the sounds, the music of those films can only be those of Sanremo. The singers and songs passed on stage at the Casino today seem a happy rewriting of the costume of those years: behind the warbles, the trills, the endless high notes, the hypocritical sweetness, there is a caricatured but very similar portrait of us Italians "as we were" and meanwhile Modugno sang of "Volare" in the painted blue of your blue eyes.
Di Kork75!
