'To speak well of it is impossible. To speak ill of it, useless." With that neat observation, writer Gianni Mura summed up the ongoing fascination of Italy's biggest glitzfest, the San Remo Song Festival, a 52-year-old anachronistic icon of popular culture that over the years has featured personalities as diverse as Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, The Corrs and ex-USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev: and which for five nights last week consistently attracted TV audiences of 16 million plus.
The most amazing thing about San Remo is that it still exists at all. The basic idea, born in the grim days of the immediate post-war era, was that of a national song contest, an event that would do something for the indigenous Italian music industry, while at the same time providing a little dose of "bread and circuses" for the struggling popolo.
In the Italy of 2002, it might seem as about as relevant as another of the popular icons of the early 1950s, namely the little Fiat 500 motor car. Against all the odds, however, the San Remo Festival has done much more than survive. Not only has it grown into the biggest TV show of the year in Italy (apart, of course, from when Italy play a World Cup match) but, more importantly, it has become a national institution, a televisual extravaganza that reflects the cultural, political and (sometimes) musical trends of the day.
Every year, the nation's media (1,400 journalists strong last week) converges on the splendid, old Ligurian Riviera town of San Remo, close to the frontier with France, for a glitzy special held in an old cinema (the Ariston) that always seems to require much wildly imaginative and outrageously expensive sprucing up. Every year, there is more speculation about who will host and co-host the show than there is about who will sing there.
Tradition has it that the show is hosted by one of Italy's leading show-biz personalities, flanked by two tall female beauties, one blonde and the other brunette, and both condemned to say little and wear even less. This year, the festival made a highly successful return to its most traditional format, being presented by the best known of all Italian TV showmen, Pippo Baudo, once famously compared to an undertaker's mate, flanked by two "lovelies", one of whom, in the past, featured prominently in soft-porn cinema.
In a three-page spread devoted to a preview of San Remo last week, prestigious daily Corriere Della Sera offered readers a quiz which featured questions about the singers, the presenters, the songs and the polemics that have marked the event down the years. For many Italians, like it or not, the history of San Remo is their own history, a sort of handy reference point when trying to recall past events : " . . . it was the year that so and so won at San Remo . . . it was the year that so and so flopped at San Remo" is a common enough conversational footnote.
It is, of course, a quintessentially Italian event, a splendid example of a weird and wonderful popular culture that has resisted the globalising influence of mid-Atlantic, Anglo-American musical diktat. Even if a series of famous foreign artists have performed there over the years (for example, the 2002 edition featured The Cranberries, The Corrs, Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue, Alanis Morisette, Alicia Keys, Destiny's Child, Shakira and Anastacia), their presence is often irrelevant and regularly ignored, as the Italian public and critics concentrate on either the Italian song contest or, more often these days, on the politically-oriented polemics engendered by the show.
The fact that on the eve of last week's festival, police in Naples discovered a warehouse containing 119 CD burners and 78,000 blank discs ready to be printed with pirated versions of this year's San Remo hits is just another indication of the festival's lasting appeal.
It is, of course, true that today's young Italians are thoroughly tuned-in to the global, Anglo-American musical culture. Yet, while for many of them the most exciting artists at San Remo last week were foreigners, such as Alanis Morisette and Anastacia, for the majority of (older) Italians it was much more interesting to speculate on what Oscar-winning comic Roberto Benigni would say during an eagerly anticipated act on the last night of the festival.
Benigni is legendary not only for improvising irreverent and scandalous routines on live TV shows but also for his oft-expressed loathing for current centre-right Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Twenty years ago, during a famous number at San Remo, he shocked the nation by kissing co-host Olimpia Carlisi on the mouth for a full 45 seconds of prime-time TV. He then went on to annoy Catholics by joking about Pope John Paul II, calling him "bad little Wojtyla" in reference to the Pope's Polish name. Even before he got on stage this year, Benigni found himself at the centre of polemics with at least one Berlusconi supporter, newspaper editor Giuliano Ferrara, threatening to invade the Ariston and throw eggs at Begnini by way of protest at his expected, leftist anti-Berlusconi tirade.
In the end, Benigni's act proved more comic than controversial, ending with a splendid impromptu rendering of Canto 33 from Dante's Paradise that earned him a standing ovation. At least the polemics prompted by Benigni made a change from the usual protests (from losing contestants) of a fixed jury. (Indeed, in 1967, one disappointed songwriter, Luigi Tenco, killed himself during the festival week).
And the song festival winner? A unremarkable song called Message of Love, performed by a group called Matia Bazar and combining the usual mix of old troopers, saccharine lyrics and bombastic finale that always tends to win at San Remo.
By next year, we will have all forgotten it. Never mind, next year will bring another instalment of glitzfest lyrics, music, politics and polemics.
