There aren’t many artists whose most successful piece really brings with it all the unsaid things, misunderstandings and misunderstandings that mark their career and perception. If nothing else, because sooner or later the truth comes out. This doesn’t happen with Giuni Russo, who died at just 53 years old on September 14, 2004, and with her classic A summer at the seaside: twenty years later, we have not understood her or the song. A song that, by the way, when it came out, in mid-1982, was a resounding success, has become one of the symbols of the Italian summer, known by everyone and the driving force (on remixes) of the homonymous comedy by Carlo Vanzina dated 2008 – is there anything more national-popular?

But the reality is different and indicative of Russo’s parable: she is not a classic summer hit, despite the variables of the case, which meant that at the time the hits were certainly more varied than those of today; she is not, above all, the classic artist of summer hits. Let’s take a step back.

An erratic artist who refused any compromise

Born in Palermo, daughter of a natural soprano mother, she was already a huge talent as a young girl, different from the context of the time, and as such, at the beginning, she struggled to find someone who had the same tools as her to understand and enhance her. In addition to a superfine technique, she had an off-scale voice, and in fact when things got going she would use it to give an alien image of herself. On the other hand, even in character she was not very easy: wild and courageous, she refused – and will refuse – any compromise, and it is known that in the show business this means forcing yourself into marginalization. Her apprenticeship was inevitably quite unhappy, at least until the turning point in 1980, when she was introduced to another great, at the time, misunderstood figure of our music: Franco Battiato.

A friendship is born, and an artistic partnership is born, with him being the first to grasp the potential of her voice and beginning to conceive pieces that actually exalt it. Battiato is also looking for the philosopher’s stone of a pop that can have great success without selling out to commercial instincts: he will succeed shortly thereafter with The master’s voicebut in the meantime he also works as an author for others, as the same witnesses For Elisawhich should have gone to Nostra and instead goes to Alice, another of her spiritual daughters whose nobler soul the public, however, immediately grasps. That said, it is not absurd to consider A summer at the seaside – which he works on with Giusto Pio, and which was born during those sessions – one of his masterpieces: the text tells of “sex mercenaries”, prostitutes that is, who from the bonfires at the edges of the roads dream, precisely, of “a summer at the seaside”; Russo’s voice rises and seems to be that of a seagull; under a carpet of futuristic and dissociated synthesizers it almost seems to be tormenting itself, like whirlpools. In short, anything but a beach song, always net of a period in which subliminal messages were present in the charts (Let’s go to the beachamong many others, speaks of a nuclear holocaust, and we are in 1983).

The love for his partner Maria Antonietta Sisini, in the bigoted Italy of the time

That’s right. On these beliefs – the need to insert experimental elements for the time and grey areas in the lyrics, together with an absolute freedom of artistic action – Russo will build the rest of her career, in a series of inevitable clashes with the record industry, which will gradually lead to a sort of cancellation. The revenge, this time as an independent, will come in 1986 with Algheroanother summer hit that is anything but banal and that tells of a “forbidden” vacation of a woman in Sardinia, that her mother “must not know about”. In the meantime, the ironic references to sex and homosexuality multiply in her songs, in step with the androgynous image with which she presents herself on stage and with that of an artist who wants to decide for herself, tied by work and love to her manager and musician, Maria Antonietta Sisini, who will accompany her until the end. In the bigoted and hetero-normative Italy of the time, where women can at most sing songs written by men – while her team is mostly female, almost Amazonian – there is enough to be scary. To mark, above all, the future.

Giuni Russo, the memory of her partner Maria Antonietta Sisini: “With her 36 years. It was love at first sight”

A mystery to be solved

And here begins another story, one that goes from the end of the eighties to all the nineties, which sees a Russo disinterested in the dynamics of success approaching from time to time the most experimental pop – as does, in the meantime, Battisti of the so-called “white period”, also at odds with the mainstream – or sacred music, to be read alongside his conversion to Catholicism. The result is more pirate and forgotten records, masterpieces at least as much as the never too celebrated cult of Energy (1981), in new wave style and unfortunately overshadowed by the same A summer at the seaside. These are the forgotten works of a visionary. The last lesson, then, with I will die of lovewith which she finally breaks the ostracism and appears at Sanremo: it’s 2003, she’s now ill with cancer, she knows she has little time left and wants to play her last dance on an important stage; she goes without hiding the effects, especially aesthetic, of the disease, transforms death into life and leaves the feeling, to many, of not having really understood who they had in front of them.

It is no coincidence that many artists have now lined up to remember her – tonight in Rome there is a collective concert organized by Sisini herself, Parallel voiceswhile in Milan a garden will be named after her – almost all of them belong to alternative music, or in any case represent outsiders. A sign that the mystery, in part, has not yet been solved.