Fifty years have passed since 1 May 1975. That day Claudio Lolli, one of the deepest and lucid Italian songwriters, lost his father. But that day an event destined to change the history of the world also happened: the United States retired from Vietnam. The news had a huge echo also in Italy, where the years of lead were experienced: a difficult time, marked by political violence, but also by an intense social, cultural and creative vitality.

I seventy and Lolli, poet of this

On May 1, 2025, the work festival is still celebrated, including concerts, rallies and events. But a lot has changed. In 1975 Italy crossed a serious economic and energy crisis, wages were low, the deaths at work much more numerous today, and political tensions poured daily into the squares. Still, there was a sense of social cohesion: the unions were the protagonists, the struggles of the workers shake society, and the young people – not yet absorbed by neoliberal individualism – manifested, occupied, built. They were not only “extremists”, as today there is a tendency to simplify: they were also poets, theators, militants of concrete utopias. Claudio Lolli was one of them. “Committed singer -songwriter”, it was said then, but it is too narrow label. Lolli was a poet who talked about the present, a narrator of the alienation of post-boom economic Italy, but also of the hopes and shadows of his generation. In his texts, politics and personal experience mix, without rhetoric, with a rare and still very current depth.

In 1976 I also saw happy gypsies, a fundamental record of Italian music. The album is a continuous suite, between author songs and jazz, which deals with social, political, existential issues. There is also talk of work, but not with the union gaze: it is a reflection on freedom, time, on the utopia possible to overcome the “eight hours”. A collective and personal work, which talks about us still today.

May 1st of celebration: a private and collective day

Among the most significant songs there is May 1st of celebration. It is not a hymn to the work festival, but a song that tells a tragic and symbolic coincidence: on May 1, 1975 Lolli loses his father, just as the end of the war in Vietnam is celebrated all over the world. A collective joy that clashes with a personal mourning. The confusion between public and private becomes poetic matter: “What a flavor of death today from the Viet-Nam / but perhaps it is my father, I confuse”.

Lolli himself, at the concert of May 1, 2010, explained that the song was born from this double emotion, from this short circuit between the festive square and the intimate pain. It is an invitation to remember that behind each collective celebration there are lives, stories, wounds. On May 1st, then, it can be a party for someone, for others a day of memory or melancholy. The song reminds us that history crosses biographies, and vice versa.

Let’s resume the earth, the moon and the abundance

Then there is another powerful moment in that album: the second part of the suite that closes it. Lolli takes the words of the Cantata del Fantoccio Lusitano, a text by the German playwright Peter Weiss, who denounced the Portuguese colonialism in Angola, and the limelight. Those phrases, originally pronounced by the colonizers, become a manifesto of the oppressed, of the last, of the “happy gypsies” in his hands. As Marco Rovelli explains in the book, we are the one to make the earth rich. Novel by Claudio Lolli and his worlds, Lolli returns poetic dignity and political force to the marginalized. Sing:

“It is we who make the earth rich / us who endure the sleep disease and malaria / We send to the cotton, rice and wheat harvest / we plant the corn on the whole plateau …”

And he concludes:

“Let’s resume it in your hand, take it back entirely / let’s take up life, the earth, the moon and the abundance.”

Fifty years later: Lolli’s memory and voice

Fifty years later, many critical issues have turned without disappearing. Salari stagnate, youth unemployment remains endemic, contracts are increasingly precarious and fragmentary. The deaths at work have halved, but not arrested. The old assembly chains have given way to new forms of exploitation: fast, digital, invisible, algorithmic. But what is most striking is the erosion of collective consciousness: the unions struggle to represent, the youth movements appear missing, the struggle for rights is often solitary. Yet, as in 1975, even today the need for a battle for the dignity of work remains alive. Forms change, not the substance. And every May 1st, after all, is an invitation to rekindle that spark.

Lolli Lolli today, on the fiftieth anniversary of that May 1, means memorying not only of a father and an artist, but also of an era that still knew “imagining”. An era in which work was fatigue and death, but also social glue. And the struggle had a sound, a voice, a poem. It was Claudio Lolli’s voice.

Author: Claudio Lolli
Title: I also saw some happy gypsies
Gender: Author music, progressive folk
Year: 1976 (Italian Emi)
Editorial mark: 9/10.