DALLA'S SECOND WIN EVER, AFTER CARUSO . WITH A VERY INTERESTING VARIANT.

In 2012, Il Sole 24 Ore published the ranking of Dalla's songs that had generated the highest royalties according to SIAE: 1. Caruso 2. Song 3. March 4, 1943 Caruso remains an unrivaled hit, but Canzone represents Dalla's second-biggest commercial success overall. Official sales figures for the single aren't available, but it plausibly sold (along with the album) no fewer than 1.5 million copies. Canzone is probably the second-highest-grossing song in Dalla's entire catalog after Caruso , according to the SIAE charts published by the business press, a sign of its enormous popularity over time, thanks in part to its numerous reinterpretations.
The present manuscript, faithful to the text of the hit, presents an interesting variant:
"(..) hard head, turnip head / I'd like to screw you here too / in the toilet of a nightclub / or on a bar table .." In the final version, chiavarti is transformed into a much more harmless amarti , with a significant semantic weakening. Censorship? Self-censorship? It's hard to say, certainly the form chiavarti would have had considerable expressive power, which instead appears blunted in the generic amarti.

"Canzone" is, on the surface, a simple declaration of love. In reality, it's one of Lucio Dalla's most intense songs, speaking above all of desire, absence, and the need for another. The protagonist can no longer bear being away from the woman he loves. He's not telling a specific story: he's pouring into music everything he wants to say to her and experience with her. The central idea is that the song itself becomes a messenger: "Canzone, cercala se puoi..." The song is sent "through the streets among the people" so that it can reach the loved one and communicate what he cannot say directly. The reference to the lyricism of the stilnovist period is subtle: in stilnovist poetry (and already in the preceding Provençal tradition), the motif of the poetic word that "travels" towards the beloved woman actually exists. In Canzone, the song is personified, "He wanders the streets among the people," he must reach the woman he loves as an emotional messenger: all these are motifs very close to the medieval topos reworked in a modern key. The real substantial difference is that while in the Stilnovo the word tends to idealize and spiritualize distance, in Dalla the song instead becomes a concrete object, almost urban and modern, which loses itself in the real world to reach someone, a concrete person.