Twenty years without Giorgio Gaber, irony and free thought

There is probably a good dose of pessimism in Sandro Luporini's words when, in a recent interview, he states that "today's kids don't know us, those of the fifty-year-old generation do".

That "they know us" obviously implies Giorgio Gaber and those works, written together over more than thirty years, which still today represent a separate story in the events of Italian entertainment and culture.

January 1st will mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of Gaber, who died at the age of 63 in 2003, and from midnight to midnight, a video marathon will be broadcast on the Foundation's website and on the Youtube channel, narrating the truly unique journey of an artist and a intellectual who had begun his career as a rock'n'roll pioneer in the 1950s and who, by combining his love for jazz and French song with uncommon entertainer skills, had become one of the most loved characters in music and television before embarking on a courageous and disruptive path that would have led him to give life to the Teatro Canzone, a completely new form of representation in which the song and the monologue come together in a show that has been a point of reference for decades necessary for collective reflection on theevolution and changes in society.

Giorgio Gaber has reworked the legacy of the Milan cultural scene of his era in an original way, where he trained alongside Dario Fo, Enzo Jannacci, Luigi Tenco, Franco Battiato, cabaret and the Piccolo Teatro in an extraordinary and unrepeatable mix.

From the illusions of '68 to the Moro kidnapping, from Tangentopoli to Berlusconi, from the fall of ideologies to the foreshadowing of populism and indifference tinged with reaction, from individual dramas to the looming consumerism up to the obsession with appearance and numbers as the main criterion of evaluation, the shows by Gaber and Luporini have dissected the most lacerating themes of the public debate of the past decades without any concession to easy consensus, using irony and culture as tools to freely express one's thoughts,