A Song of Freedom and Lost Love: Collaboration Inside Pozzuoli's Female Prison

The idea came to him a year ago: to create a song together with women, musician friends but above all with the inmates of a prison: "I imagined that, like me, they keep company with songs," says the Lucanian singer-songwriter Canio Loguercio. "And I felt the need not for a technical chant but for an internal and intense whisper, as happens to those who cannot sing loudly and as I try to do in my songs which are mostly whispered." Therefore, he wrote to the heads of the Pozzuoli women's penitentiary who granted him the project: he would spend some days together with the guests of the facility to create "their song of freedom." The result was "A n'ammore sperduto," a song in Neapolitan written together with Giulia, Raffaella, Annabella, Simona, Katia, Annamaria, Amelia and also Charity who is Nigerian but felt comfortable with the Neapolitan vernacular, and then Filomena D'Andrea Makardìa and Unaderosa, musicians very attentive to social issues, like Eduarda Iscaro who, in addition to singing, contributed the sound of her accordion, together with the guitar of Massimo Antonietti and the trumpet of Ciro Ricciardi, sounds then arranged by Loguercio himself with Rocco Petruzzi who added his keyboards, then mixed and produced the song; the song was paired with a music video directed by Denis Gianniberti. The song and the video are presented on Tuesday, April 16, at 5:30 pm at the Premio Napoli foundation. The author invited the prison authorities, the musicologist and composer Pasquale Scialò, and the actress Cristina Donadio. What is a lost love? "A feeling that has been lost and who knows, may be found again," comments the artist who says he cited several songs from the classic Neapolitan repertoire, from "Reginella" to "Marechiaro" - the full text of the piece attached - to pay homage to the city to which he is very attached to an immortal tradition. "Songs are life companions. They tell stories, pains, and hopes that seem to belong to each of us. This song, dedicated to a lost love, takes us to the bottom of the sea or in flight, to a elsewhere where one day we might perhaps find that love. It is a chant that digs into the verses of classic Neapolitan songs and prefigures spaces of intimate freedom that only a deep passion can return to us." Loguercio explains why the choice of a song written with incarcerated people: "I felt a great emotion in sharing this view of love and distance with some inmates of the Pozzuoli prison. They made intense and real a feeling that, without them, I would never have been able to describe with such expressive force." And then of the invitation to female artist friends: "I also asked three friends, Eduarda Iscaro, Filomena D'Andrea Makardìa, and Unaderosa, very talented singers who chew tradition with energy and a strong sense of contemporaneity, to join us in this almost dreamlike journey between sky and sea, experienced from the inside of a prison. Together we tried to imagine going beyond that space of confinement where we recorded the song and then shot the music video. I hope you can perceive the joy of a job done together with so much cheerfulness, but also with some tears of emotion." The conclusion: "Thanks to all those who participated in the realization of 'A n'ammore sperduto' and, in particular, to the staff of the Pozzuoli female penitentiary and to Adriana Intilla for following us with generous availability."