“We live in a world where everything is communicated, always. I followed my instinct, my character. I put myself aside, I cut off all contact with social networks and I focused on what was happening to me. In March 2022, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. A little cough that did not go away, the decision to have an X-ray. A shock. I was speechless, this disease is in our lives, but you think it will never affect you. Suddenly, everything changed.” With these words, singer-songwriter Luca Carboni tells Corriere della Sera about his fight and the sudden change in his life. “I was recording a new album – he explains – I had already defined ten songs including the single “Il ballon” and another that should have been released that summer, a song that is very close to my heart and that I had written in 1986. I proposed to Vasco and that I then decided to record personally: “Rimini en été”. I had planned the album and then the tour. On the contrary, in a few minutes, everything changed. From the choice of songs I moved on to the choice of therapies to survive. The tumor was large, difficult to operate on.”
Chemotherapy, surgery. “You can't feel healed if the other person hasn't healed, the person you had next to you while you were getting the infusion.”
Carboni confided in the oncology staff of Sant'Orsola, led by the head physician Prof. Andrea Ardizzoni, with the collaboration of the pulmonologist Piero Candoli and the surgeon Piergiorgio Solli. And he immediately began a massive chemotherapy treatment. The tumor shrank a lot and the operation to remove it was performed in August. “Fortunately, there were no metastases and after the operation we continued with immunotherapy. After two years I can say that I am technically cured even if, with this type of disease, this word has a fragile meaning. This experience has brought me into contact with many people. I attended the oncology, I lived the stories of many patients. Cancer is not an individual experience, but a collective one. You cannot feel cured if the other person has not been cured, the person you had next to you while you received the infusion. In recent years I have prayed for myself, but also for those who shared my path. Like a friend of mine from the island of Elba, who discovered the same illness as me but was unable to cope with it,” the artist tells Corriere.
Painting and nature as salvation
“I believe it, and I have no reason to hide it. From the news, the X-rays and especially the look of the radiologist, I was convinced that I had little time. I thought of death, for the first time, as a concrete possibility. But I owe to medical science the return, very soon, of a reasonable hope. I did not believe it, I imagined that it was a necessary consolation, yet I clung to this glimmer. I thought of two things: I had to trust the doctors and count on destiny, fighting in my own way. However, even when I saw the end as a possible eventuality, I felt happy. I led a beautiful life, full of light, joy, love. “My journey was tiring and full of satisfactions,” Carboni explains. An unexpected and dangerous guest, believes the singer-songwriter. “I fought. I stopped smoking, I walked a lot. I went to the Apennines and looked for landscapes that would make my relationship with life even stronger. Nature helped me. (…) Then painting helped me a lot, which has always been my other passion,” he says. Luca Carboni will return “to the world” in November, in Bologna with an exhibition, curated by Luca Beatrice and produced by Elastica, with the paintings, drawings, the storyboard of the first video he made and the notepads on which I have the notes for my entire album. Forty years after his first album.
The meeting with Dalla
“After all, I am the son of a generosity and a curiosity, that of Lucio Dalla. I was twenty years old and I was convinced that, to reach others, rather than sending audio cassettes that no one would listen to, the impact of the written page was more effective. So I put my lyrics in an envelope for Ron and delivered them to Vito, the owner of the tavern in Bologna where all the singers I liked at the time went,” he says. “That evening – Carboni reports – Lucio and Stadio were sitting at a table discussing the lyrics of the band's first album. I stopped to watch them from the restaurant window. I saw Lucio take the envelope, open it, start reading and then hand out the sheets to the others. I heard him say “Fuck, guys”. I had put my home phone number on the envelope and I saw Lucio get up and take the restaurant phone. I didn't know what to do, but I plucked up courage and went inside just as my sister told him I had to be there. I patted him on the shoulder and he, amused, looked at me and whistled “I thought you were an adult…”. They made me sit down at their table, I felt like I was dreaming. Then I went to the studio and, following Lucio's instructions, I showed Stadio how I would sing some songs I had written for them. Dalla asked the sound engineer to record them and then play them for me on the studio speakers. At most, I had heard my voice on the Walkman… “You sound a bit like De Gregori” he told me and for me who had always loved Francesco, it was a huge compliment. Yet I was ashamed to sing, I never had the audacity of the leader, it was not my approach to life. I don't like winners, because I don't like the confidence in success, the belief in the superiority of others. I have sold, over time, five million records but I have always thought that in the end it was an accident.”
(on the cover Luca Carboni guest of the show “Che tempo che fa” hosted by Fabio Fazio, Milan, October 8, 2012. ANSA/MATTEO BAZZI)
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