10 years have already passed, but Fabrizio is still alive in each of us" – so Francesco Serreli of the Genoa Pride Committee remember the great poet, singer-songwriter who died on January 11, 1999 – “The one described in his texts, belonging to an immediate popular culture, was a Genoa, rich in diversity, it was the Genoa of our stories. In his songs lived, photographed with human compassion, homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, workers, outcasts, gypsies, drug addicts, AIDS patients—all those who still today lack a full voice and dignity.”
“We invite everyone to visit the great exhibition that his city is dedicating to him at the Palazzo Ducale and which will last until May 3rd..” – he declares Ostilia Mulas – “Genoa pays homage to him and his work by creating a journey that brings to life the music, experiences, and passions that made him a spokesperson for the excluded and a poet of our times.”
http://www.palazzoducale.genova.it/deandre
“De Andrè leaves us a wonderful and immense heritage of art and a strong message of freedom for all” – he concludes Mirella Izzo – “The LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) community wants to remember him today and forever as a great poet, but above all as one of us.. As Genoese, we feel proud of him and, like him, in love with our city, which he described perfectly in the sentences that open the exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale.”
“When I was a refugee in Piedmont during the war, Genoa was a legend for me. I saw it for the first time when I was five years old and fell in love with it immediately, terribly. Genoa is like a mother to me. It's where I learned to live. It gave birth to me and raised me until I turned thirty-five: and that's no small thing; in fact, perhaps it's almost everything. Although the distance between that almost and that everything was bridged by Brassens' songs. Today, it seems to me that Genoa bears the face of all the poor devils I met in its alleys, the outcasts I would later find in Sardinia, but whom I first met in the reserves of the old city, the 'pretty' women of Via del Campo and the scoundrels who, for a meal, might even give away their mother. The flowers that bloom from the manure. The godless for whom, who knows, God might not have a small, well-protected ghetto in his paradise, always ready to welcome them.‘
Fabrizio De André