Pavana (Pistoia) – “From the other side of the river there was the mountain of my Pavana…”. In his Pavana everything started and everything ended. In that small hamlet of Sambuca Pistoiese nestled in the Apennines split in two by the Porrettana road, on the Tuscan side, Guccini died. Like the God he sang about. In that village of just a handful of souls who all know each other by name, the green gate with the path, at the end of which crouches the Maestro’s white house, is recognized only by the intercom. A small plaque with a handwritten note: “Guccini Fra.”. Just a hint, discreet. As discreet as the mourning in which Pavana is tightly closed: gathered around the man and the artist who made those wooded slopes the mythical horizon of a spiritual music. The soul’s bed that in the harmonica and the notes of ’Christmas in Pavana’ cradles the past, the present, and the last future of Francesco Guccini.
Behind that green gate the Maestro rests watched over by his close family members, and since morning people arrive in a relay of affection to leave a flower. To lay down a memory. To send a kiss or a wave or even to place some Pistoiese scarves on the gravel. And while dozens of reporters peek over the railing into the garden where from time to time his wife Raffaella and daughter Teresa appear, on the other side of the street a man watches from behind the door with teary eyes.
Lino Pieraccini after all knew Guccini his whole life. “Since we were little like this,” he roughly indicates with his hand. Mr. Lino’s eyes smile as he remembers Guccini. Childhood friend Francesco, that boy “with whom we ran up and down these hills gathering chestnuts or stealing fruit at night from the rows,” Lino confesses as moments of past life crowd his memory. “He was a few years older and often we would sit with the other boys to listen to him sing.” Then, as now. Until his last days. Until “a few months ago, before Francesco’s condition worsened,” Mr. Lino, friend and neighbor of the house in Pavana, still recalls. “As long as he could, he kept singing here too, at the Proloco club. And then he often invited me to his house. But I didn’t want to disturb him. So he came back here and called me again. He wasn’t just good, he was excellent.”
A few of the passersby who came to pay tribute to the Maestro were allowed to cross the threshold of the house in Pavana. An exception was made for Elisabetta Piludu, cook at Caciosteria Due Ponti, the restaurant where Guccini went to eat “even a couple of times a week” as long as he could. “For me Francesco was a source of wisdom. A person who knew everything, knew the dialects of the whole world, history. He knew how to give meaning to all words and with boundless humanity. He was a person of simple tastes, a unique person, whose voice I will miss most.”
That voice that sang for generations. That sang of his home in Pavana, where he grew up during the war and then chose to live as an adult and where on Saturday, August 8, the funeral will also be held privately. A voice that sang indeed of the train to Pavana. And now Guccini has taken that train again. One last time: for an eternal buen retiro. And from the other side of the river, Pavana will rise again for him. With “its magic, and my strength and my imagination.”
