Sal Da Vinci surprisingly triumphs in the 76th Sanremo Festival and, as is normal, there are those who are happy and those who are not. It’s part of the game: every victory brings with it enthusiasm but also disappointment and controversy. However, if many limit themselves to judging the song or the final result, others take advantage of this to implicitly or explicitly demonstrate their prejudices and xenophobia towards Naples and its musical tradition. In this regard, I also found the comment of an authoritative editorialist like Aldo Cazzullo, who on the Corriere della Sera he writes that “Forever yes” (the winning song) “could be the soundtrack to a Camorra wedding (…)”. How is it possible to express oneself in this way about a singer who legitimately, without stealing anything from anyone, won the most important event dedicated to Italian music? Here we are well beyond musical criticism: we enter the territory of offensive allusion. The Neapolitan neomelodic tradition is part of our cultural heritage, whether we like it or not.

Sarcasm

You can appreciate it or not, but dismissing it with sarcasm or comparing it to organized crime simply means not recognizing the complexity of Italian popular culture. And you can’t even appeal to the alleged lack of depth of Sal Da Vinci’s lyrics, because in the past in Sanremo songs that were completely similar in depth won. Last but not least “Balorda nostalgia”, which is the typical pop love song, nothing particularly high. Even accusing Neapolitans of voting for their singers en masse makes little sense.

“For a lifetime”

Firstly because, according to the televoting, Sayf should have won (a song that I personally preferred, as I also wrote here on Today). But above all because voting is absolutely legitimate and if Neapolitans are warmer and more tied to their traditions you certainly can’t blame them. Finally, Sal Da Vinci has been criticized because his song talks about marriage and “lifelong” promises.

The most hated dialects

Many have seen in his text a hymn to conservatism, bigotry and patriarchal monogamy. But even from this point of view it is an ideological reading, therefore inevitably subjective. Sal Da Vinci simply expressed his concept of love, which apparently, despite everything, is still widely shared. Many of the attacks aimed at him are therefore completely specious and poorly conceal a problem that Italy, despite the passing of the years, still struggles to overcome: anti-Southernism. It is no coincidence that in the ranking of the most hated dialects by Italians (published by Preply), in the first three positions we find three dialects from the South and the Islands: Neapolitan, Sardinian and Sicilian.

It’s hard to think that it’s just a coincidence. And I say this as a Milanese, raised in a cultural context in which the Northern League was on the rise and in which, inevitably, despite myself, I absorbed many stereotypes towards Southern Italy. Precisely for this reason I believe that, today more than ever, we should try to free ourselves from these prejudices. We can all be better than this.