Desolation Row (Via della Povertà)

Description

"...Translation of the closing song of the famous album Highway 61 Revisited (1965) by Bob Dylan, the piece is the first fruit of the collaboration between De André and Francesco De Gregori. The author plays with the stories, weaves them together and transports the characters into today's society. It doesn't take long for such crazy and cruel characters to be made into symbols, these people are ultimately not that different from all of us , with their own fears and their own certainties..."

In 2003, amid recovering from a knee injury, I began painting inspired by Fabrizio De André's songs. Prior, my landscapes like "Porto del Giglio" and "Rio Marina" lacked living beings. Yet, "Via della Povertà" with its vibrant characters—mariners in a beauty salon, a blind commissioner foreseeing misfortune, a bold Cinderella akin to Bette Davis, Romeo ousted mid-declaration—became my muse. Despite pain, I embraced the challenge of portraying these carnival-like masks revealing human essence, akin to De André's ironic narratives. Thus began my artistic journey into interpreting his songs.