Pavana (Pistoia)-Bologna, August 8, 2026 – The speech by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and president of the CEI, at the private funeral of Francesco Guccini, this morning in Pavana, was not just a speech, but something that goes beyond words, beyond the spaces and times of this earthly life. Because every phrase of Zuppi recalls a phrase of Francesco, through the lyrics of the songs of the Maestrone. Phrase after phrase, the cardinal leaves a fresco of the singer-songwriter through a profound paraphrase of love and faith.
Below is the full text of Zuppi’s speech.
“It was not such a defined agreement as the one Francesco made with Piero, about the commitment to return and give first-hand information about what comes after, but one evening, talking about the last farewell, Francesco said he would be happy with my presence, with all the related things, then adding that, if the roles were reversed, he could, in the Cathedral or wherever, be present with his farewell. It’s my turn. However, I believe we all have something to say to Francesco: we do not know precisely, (with some presumption we delude ourselves into wanting and especially understanding everything) what you see, the fullness of that light that you actually sensed from here and were able to glimpse in the poignant and infinite beauty of life. You said of yourself that you were an “agnostic possibilist.” In search. One thing is certain: it seems impossible to say goodbye to you and measure the absence, as many of your friends (how many you had!) have done, who all felt a little more alone. Absence but also presence. We have read many observations, emotions, all personal and positive, full of humanity. It always happens this way in poetry and music, which give words to feelings and generate feelings that speak to the interior. Poetry and music always generate more poetry and help the heart to sing.
Discretion and reserve
You left in the “tired, long and idle hours of August” (Song of the twelve months), with the discretion and reserve that have always been yours, hiding in two trifles how moved you were and then, in reality, making us moved by how you tell your story. We also understood what was screaming inside you to come out, and we understood that one must choose in time, not arrive there out of opposition.
Guccini’s thought
The Lord also could not bear dogmas and prejudices that struck others, the new protagonists, the ambitious, the cunning and the bullies, the kings, the strict militants, the empty people, the priests who do not know how to look into their hearts, the materialists with the fixed idea that God is dead and that man is alone in this abyss, but also the visionary Jacobins and the martyrs of hatred and terror, those who paralyze you saying it is for love, the Manicheans who shout either with us or against us. Ideologies confuse, they hurt. You are right. Giants are needed, and those who please the Lord are not the great of this world but those with a big heart, with much humanity, free, who share and do not calculate, who give and do not possess. Poetry is always giving all of oneself. Discretion, courtesy, ancient elegance, shyness but roots of ancient wisdom, “raised among the wise ignorant of the mountains, who knew Dante by heart and improvised poetry.” Alien to exhibitionism, yet very delicate in communicating.
The mystery of love
Talking and re-talking about time and days gone by, and about the mystery of time which has an explanation in our bonds of love for which it is always true for everyone that “I am not when you are not here.” It is the best definition of God, because God is understood only in love, questioning what new flavor the universe has, because the question of life is always precisely this. That today would remain without tomorrow or that tomorrow could tend to infinity? He did not resign himself to being evil and you did not stop dreaming and seeking wings. This question for Francesco, and for everyone, is the intuition that is a wide-open door in the heart: There must be, I feel it, on earth or in heaven a place where we will not suffer and everything will be right and where we will find forever. “And my life falls into another life and I feel only a point, along the clear and infinite line of an immobile and presumed mechanism” (Lives). In these terms you loved to talk about your life, but it was not rhetoric, it was humility, the opposite of hybris, which belongs only to the great, to those who do not have the presumption and arrogance of having reached goals, but move in the paths of life like a pilgrim with a precarious gait. You spoke to us of the “eternal dripping of time,” of the “rocky tolling of moments” (Lives), of the “music of today that has gone where yesterday went” and we will never know where (Another day has gone). Time is “like that pain to which no name is given, a circular obsession between will and inability” (Song for Anna). You asked yourself – and all of us with you – “but time, time who will give it back to me?” (Letter) and also how to be in time, for example when man must learn to live without killing, a very bitter consideration that has found dramatically in these times many further questions.
The precariousness of history
The precariousness of history and time has always tormented you, mystery and torment, like the clock that emphasizes every second. You never had the presumption of finding definitive answers: every day, you said, “my questions, my nothingness, my pain are there waiting for me” (Song for Piero). The ethics of the human, the dignity of politics, allergic to empty dogmatisms, precisely because ethical and centered on the human, to not be “afraid of the different and the opposite, of those who fight to change, afraid of the ideas of free people, who suffer, err and hope” (Song for Silvia); with your Don Quixote you “proud of my dreaming and of this eternal stumbling of mine,” you forced us to ask ourselves “should I back down because Evil and Power have such a gloomy aspect? Should I also give up some dignity and accept that this is reality?” then inviting us to “spit the heart in the face of injustice day and night.” Life never ceases to amaze us, how it is made and how one manages it, and the thousand ways and times, then the possibilities, the choices, the changes, fate, the necessities. Now Francesco, as you said with poignant words to Van Loon – daddy Ferruccio, you will have “a lot of time to think”; you had “your bags already packed for a long time, like every prudent man,” you will find your place, your story, your books, old friends and, finally, the infinite (Van Loon). But you will not miss the ironic counterpoint that has always belonged to you and allowed you to communicate lightness even in the darkest circumstances; and you will smile reminding the friends you will find again and who will throw you a big party the words that you, like few others, managed to pronounce with a sharp spirit and at the same time with courtesy: “if and when we die, but the thing is uncertain, we will have a paradise tailor-made, very much like the usual place, but the drinks are free and do no harm.” And that God “tolerates us, lets us have our games, something few have done in this world” (The friends). Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell: these are the voices you made your own, murmur and infinite echo of God. It is our reality: suspended between the night that is about to end, always watchful, insisting, asking again, without getting tired. “Now I understand my not understanding, that there will be no answer, that the answer about the future is in a voice that will ask: Shomèr ma mi-llailah.”
In continuous search
Today you meet the answer, which in reality was in nostalgia, in the search for light and in the wonder for humanity that you described in the many characters and encounters you made us know. Doubt was the way to face things without cheating, with integrity. You never stopped asking and listening. Whoever makes the question of the human their own, always discovers the presence of God. Traina, which I know dear to Raffaella, agnostic I leave this posthumous poem, which is also a confession of faith: “When I stand before you, Lord, if you do not forgive those who have not joined the chorus of hosannas, perhaps you will forgive those who confessed, Lord, to suffer your absence.” “One must continue to ask oneself, even when there is no answer,” you said. “We shall see.”
These words help me: “This morning I thought: the child in the mother’s womb is warm and probably happy. He believes that
that brief warm space is a universe, where nothing is missing. Of the universe we know, what suspicion can he have? None? Assuming that one can communicate with the child who is not yet born, what notions could we give him of what a book is, a house? Not even the smallest. We
find ourselves in the same situation in relation to the world beyond that stretches around us and that we reach only with death. In reality, we too are inside a dark cavity where we talk to ourselves and we will be born only by screaming, when we die. Then we will discover a universe of unspeakable beauty and we will freely wander among the stars.”
The intuition of love
Here, faith gives words and certainty to that intuition of love, of the heart, far from being a palliative, for which “we want to remember you as you were. To think that you still live. I want to think that you still listen to me. That you smile as you did then.” The answer is God who is not only inside us but also outside, is a You, is love without which we are not and who today in his mystery reveals himself.
“You are, I know, but where, who can say? In me resembles what I see…. Let us then believe that you are here. And when the hour of fear comes close these my human eyes will close, open them, Lord,
others greater to contemplate your immense face and death be a greater birth to me.” (Eugenio Montale)
The passing on August 6
Francesco died on the day of the Feast of the Transfiguration, the glory of God revealed in the human, on the day we remember Hiroshima and ask that that horror consciously makes us choose defense and not retribution, dialogue and not
clash. Because we must learn to live without killing. It is also the day of the death of Paul VI. “Here, I would like, in conclusion, to be in the light.
Usually the end of temporal life, if not darkened by infirmity, has its own gloomy clarity: that of memories, so beautiful, so attractive, so incomplete, so nostalgic and so clear now to denounce their irretrievable past and to mock their desperate call. The scene of the world is a design, still incomprehensible today for the most part, of a Creator God, who is called Our Father who is in heaven! Thanks, O God, thanks and glory to you, O Father in this last glance I realize that this fascinating and mysterious scene is a reverberation, is a reflection of the first and only light; it is a natural revelation of an extraordinary richness and beauty, which had to
be an initiation, a prelude, a preview, an invitation to the vision of the invisible Sun.” (Paul VI)
The Lord is my shepherd: I lack nothing; he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
“Lord you are the endless life in the homeland for all men that you yourself have prepared. You are the lamp of the house that gently illuminates, you are the day that knows no sunset; you are the bright morning star. You are the home of all the poor, the tired and the weary; you are the shepherd of the scattered flock, whom you gather from division, source of mercy and peace; you are
infinite sweetness. All those who belong to you follow you where you are, and you are there forever, you never leave, you eternally lead the dance of your children on joyful meadows.” Who belongs to you,
Lord? Who has been just, who has hungered and thirsted for justice, who has not stopped seeking you. (Quodvultdeus)
Finally, the blessing of the body: the tears of Raffaella, Guccini’s wife, and the embrace with the cardinal.
Read more Silvana from ‘Canzone per un’amica’, Castellarano still remembers her: “Guccini made her eternal”
