De Gregori and Zalone, the strange couple of music on the new Robinson

We titled the issue of Robinson on newsstands Sunday 14 April with Republic “The Prince and the Comedian”. On the cover of our supplement, in fact, you will find the prince of our songwriters, Francesco De Gregoriand the king of comedy Checco Zalone. They tell their story, together, to Luca Valtorta in a long interview, which touches on the release of Pastichethe surprising album they made together but above all it is the intimate chat, between life, music and comedy, between two entertainment superstars who have discovered unexpected affinities.

As you can read in their dialogue, which took place in De Gregori’s Roman house, between the sounds of spring coming through the window and those of the capital’s traffic, next to the musician’s large black piano, we could have in fact titled this Robinson “story of a friendship”, because friendship is precisely what pushed De Gregori and Zalone to make this album together.

They tell how it was born. Francesco says that he liked Cado dalle nubi, the first film by Luca Pasquale Medici, aka Checco Zalone, “A certain grace, a way of telling human events, even the most trivial ones, abandonments, falling in love, with a comedy that it’s never crass.” So, while passing through Bari, he wanted to meet her. “I was on a boat in Torre a Mare, making octopuses with my architect friend”, recalls Checco, and so “we went to eat at a pizzeria”.

As they got together, the common passion for music (“Checco plays the piano very well” says Francesco, “De Gregori is the absence of patterns in everything” replies Zalone) led them to cultivate the idea of ​​making a record together. And since on the album there are two unreleased songs but also new versions of much-loved pieces such as Rimmel and Buonanotte fiorellino, their conversation also becomes a journey into those little pieces of memory that bind each of us to the Prince’s songs.

Continuing to read the new Robinson, you will find, as always, author reviews of new releases in bookstores, pages dedicated to literature for children and other not-to-be-missed interviews with pianist Alice Sara Ott, who is revolutionizing the way of holding concerts of classical music and has built an amazing career fighting against ALS, to Artificial Intelligence expert Nello Cristianini, protagonist of Antonio Gnoli’s Straparlando. But we don’t stop here: in the space dedicated to TikTok, our bookclub 2.0 launches the book of the month to read together, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, while in the Art pages Dario Pappalardo talks with Francesco Vezzoli, which brings to Venice, at Palazzo Correr, a series of works that play with the history of Italian painting. On the page dedicated to Readings, a text by the Argentine writer Alberto Manguel dedicated to the translation, “sublime theft”.