[Monday Notes No. 181] La nevicata del ‘56 is a song written in the 1970s by Carla Vistarini and Luigi Lopez, but remained unused for a long time. Only in 1990 did it find a great interpreter in Mia Martini at the Sanremo Festival. That same year, the song was also interpreted by Franco Califano, who however proposed it with his own lyrics.
La nevicata del ‘56 is about Rome, which in 1956 was covered by snow for almost a month. The song was initially proposed to Gabriella Ferri, the greatest interpreter of Roman popular song. Apparently, the singer liked the song, but for some reason it was shelved and had to wait a good fifteen years before being recorded.
The song has a minor first part. This is the moment when the memory surfaces in the singer’s memory, bringing to mind an empty and silent city, where the sound of the river and fountains can be heard. The peculiarity of the song is that the melody lingers on each chord for a long time before moving on to the next. This happens more often in popular music than in the pop/rock music repertoire.
The opening verse returns a second time with the same metrics, while the third performance is a bit shorter, in fact it only lasts 12 measures and the chords are a bit closer together. Try listening to the part beginning with the verse ‘C’era sempre un gran sole e la notte era bella’, at minute 1’55‘’, and you will hear that the verse is similar to the previous ones, but at the same time is different.
After the three verses, the song shifts to the key of G major, and remains there for the rest of the song. Here again, the change is strong and should be easy to recognise even if you do not play a musical instrument. The change between minor and major mode occurs at minute 2’22’, on the line “Com’è, com’è, com’è, che c’era posto pure per le favole?”.
The song is therefore not as repetitive as it may seem at first listening. The verses have small differences and the refrain modulates from minor to major mode, as happens in much popular music, but more rarely in the singer-songwriter repertoire. Overall, the song has a linear melody, with a few octave jumps that highlight Mia Martini’s vocal talents.
Here instead is the version of the song by Franco Califano, who had also collaborated on the original lyrics and then composed one for his own use.
If Carla Vistarini’s original text is more delicate and universal, Franco Califano’s also has its own beauty. The Roman singer-songwriter imbues the song with his own identity as a shameless male, capable of promises never kept, but also of inventing a song in order to seduce the woman he loves.
The title of the song, The Snowfall of ‘56, takes us back to a now remote event. One has to think that it was composed in 1975, when the memory of that snowfall must still be alive, at least in many Roman citizens. Even after such a long time, however, the song retains its grace and I like to think that the episode mentioned is just a pretext for a song about nostalgia.
In particular, it seems to me that the finest verse is “E c’era pure la luna, molto meglio di adesso” (And there was also the moon, much better than now). This verse seems to me an admission that, perhaps, nostalgia is something that arises within us, provoked simply by the passage of time.
Indeed, the city of Rome has certainly changed between 1956 and 1975 when the song was written, and again between 1990 when Mia Martini sang it, and the present. But it is difficult to think that the moon is really any different. Nostalgia belongs to all of us, each of us will choose a snowfall or some other special episode to turn his thoughts back towards a tender memory.
Until next Monday!