“Have we really reached the point where someone decides who can listen to De André and who can’t? Who can stay at a concert and who can leave? I’m also used to protests and insults, sometimes it can happen, no drama” but “no one – and I repeat NO ONE – can decide which singers I can listen to, which books to read or not read, which films to watch”. Thus the deputy prime minister and minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, posting on social media the video showing a protest by a girl at the Agnata, a stage of the “Time in Jazz” Festival in the Sardinian house of Fabrizio De André.
Salvini: “That girl had the right to challenge me”
“That girl also had the right to challenge me (even if she disturbed the artist, Dori and all the rest of the audience) just as I have the right to respond to her,” he underlines.
“I’ve loved De André since high school”
“I have loved De André since high school, thanks to my parents’ records. I don’t know what Fabrizio would say today” but “I know what his songs, his music, his voice say to me. They excite me, they make me think and sometimes they even make me question. But do you know what really worries me? Not what happened to me. But the world we are leaving to our children. A world in which you are free, but only if you have the ‘right’ ideas? In which you can listen to an artist, but only if you have the right political license? It doesn’t exist”, he concludes.