"Returning to the festival sixty years later? It's beautiful: it will be a moment of great gratitude for the affection that the public has retained for me all this time."
It was 1964 when Gigliola Cinquetti won at Sanremo at just 16 years old with Non ho l'età (per amarti), the song with which shortly afterwards she would triumph at the Eurovision in Copenhagen, the first Italian to win the competition and the youngest singer ever to get on the podium.
Now Amadeus has wanted her as a guest on the final evening of the festival, Saturday 10 February, to revive a song that today "evokes memories of an era that no longer exists, between the tenderness and the bitter taste of a society in which women were one step behind."
With her clear, powerful voice and innocent freshness, that little girl from Verona beat everyone: "If they had told me then that after sixty years I would have sung again I'm not old enough - smiles Cinquetti, who is now 76 years old and for a few days she took refuge in her mountains in Lessinia - I would have replied 'let's hope not', as if to no longer let myself be ensnared by the mechanisms of the show. And instead now a circle has closed and it's beautiful: it's never a given that they'll call you. I am ready to take back everything that is mine, including the song. I also fought it in vain for a long time, as often happens to artists, who struggle to recognize their work when it is too successful: it is as if in some way it was taken away from the public who wants to interpret and perceive her in their own way, it's a subtle psychological game. But now I'm proud of that little girl and I think: 'see this one, she was really strong".
And then "everything comes back: to celebrate 70 years of television at the Gallerie d'Italia in Turin, the exhibition Non ha l'età - The Sanremo Festival in black and white 1951-1976, curated by Aldo Grasso, has just opened: in I'm half there too."
Sanremo projected her into the Empyrean of success, dragging her from France to Japan, from Niagara Falls to Chile, but also exposed her to labels: those who - like Luigi Tenco - judged her to be respectable and unpleasant, those who saw her as a Madonna, like Cinquetti herself tells the story in the autobiographical novel Sometimes you dream, released at the end of 2023 by Rizzoli.
"I had a complicated but beautiful youth, because it was a test that toughened me and made me understand many things. Now I'm in a period of gratitude: all the fears and doubts that accompanied me as a girl have dissipated. To put it with another famous song, The sky is always bluer".
But it's not just the book: the film The Right Age has arrived on Paramount+, the comedy directed by Alessio Di Cosimo which sees her alongside Valeria Fabrizi, Giuliana Lojodice and Paola Pitagora in the role of an aged quartet who don't give up as time passes.
"I found these extraordinary traveling companions: we lived both the set and the private moments together. It was therapeutic, regenerating."
Now the theater awaits her: "I like meeting the public in the flesh. Between one piece and another there will be monologues in which I will tell myself a little more, given that all my life I have been very reserved... Young people are worried, they are afraid of making mistakes, when you are older you can allow yourself more freedom."
The show, which should follow the title of the book, Sometimes you dream, will debut on March 12th in Trento, before arriving on April 29th at the Olimpico theater in Rome and on May 10th at the Dogana theater in San Marino.
Married since the age of 32 to Luciano Teodori, Cinquetti lives in the countryside outside Rome.
"Am I the right age? I live the present with an intensity - she concludes - that could last forever".
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