• "Princesa" ["Princess" in
Portuguese] is an
accordion-led folk song whose rhythm, halfway between a
milonga and a Portuguese
fado, is carried forward by De André's fast delivery of witty, pointed lyrics, which are partly based on, and feature a number of excerpts from, Brazilian transsexual model Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque's 1995 autobiography (co-written with journalist and former
Red Brigades criminal Maurizio Jannelli), also titled "Princesa" after a nickname of hers. The song narrates her youth and her failed early attempts at
gender transitioning, then goes on to narrate a series of mostly true events. However, the last verse of the song features a "happy ending", with Princesa feeling contented about being in a stable relationship with a wealthy lawyer from
Milan, which does not match real life at all: Farias never fully completed her male-to-female transition, and committed suicide in 1999. After the last verse, the coda of the song features a long list of words in
Brazilian Portuguese, sung by a male/female choir (including two transsexuals) over a prominent Brazilian
percussion background, representing Princesa's childhood. • Subtitled "A forza di essere vento" ("By virtue of being wind"), "Khorakhané" is a soft, slow-paced song named after the
Muslim Romani people of
Bosnia and
Montenegro and consisting in a concise recapitulation of their history. It features a poetical ending sung by
Dori Ghezzi in a quasi-operatic style, whose lyrics, a metaphorical expression of a quest for freedom, were written by De André and translated into
Sinte Romani by Roma poet and writer Giorgio Bezzecchi, a friend of his. • "Anime salve", a duet with
Ivano Fossati which includes prominent
synths and a more contemporary-sounding arrangement in comparison to other
acoustic-oriented tracks on the album, is a thoughtful ballad about
solitude. Coming after two tracks whose protagonists experienced solitude as being imposed on them by external circumstances, Fossati meant this song to be a hymn to solitude as a choice that can save one's soul from the worst human failings, solitude as a counterbalance to living in the world, a solitude that gives space for better understanding, learning and reflection about the world, a solitude that counters the tendencies towards violence that result from people banding together and identifying as a group, both at the local/social level and at the level of political states. De André's and Fossati's vocals complement each other throughout the track, finishing and continuing each other's vocal lines; although they never met each other during the recording of the album, they did perform the song as a duet during the subsequent live tour. • "Dolcenera" [literally "Sweetblack" - referring to flooding water] is a musical counterpart to "Â duménega" from
Crêuza de mä and "Don Raffaè" from
Le nuvole: a sprung, slightly irregular but metrically clear
tarantella rhythm, punctuated by acoustic guitars and accordions. It is spatially and temporally set during the October 8, 1970 flood in Genoa, and its lyrics, freely based on newspaper accounts from the era, are about a man who is trying to organize a clandestine meeting with his mistress (a married woman); however, she gets stuck in a
tram carriage which is separated from the rest of the tram because of the flood, and the planned meeting never happens. The lyrics also feature lines sung in
Genoese dialect, which express the man's thoughts.
Apulian singer-songwriter
Dolcenera (a.k.a. Emanuela Trane) chose her stage name after this song; she and
Lucio Fabbri from
PFM, her first producer, were inspired by her moody looks - she dressed almost exclusively in black during her early career - and by the dark-sounding lyrics to her first compositions. • "Le acciughe fanno il pallone" ["The anchovies make a ball"] is a song about
fishermen, focusing on the hardships of their work. Its title derives from a phenomenon, often happening on the Ligurian coast, where anchovies, pursued by bluefish, run by the thousands toward the surface, and, in doing so, defend themselves by gathering up into a glittering ball. The lyrics to the song are about another kind of solitude, due in this case to poverty. The hard-working fisherman is in competition with a tuna for the anchovies he fishes for, and faces an uncertain market demand onshore for his catch even then. He can only dream of catching a golden fish that would improve his circumstances and allow him to marry. Musically, the song is a moderately-paced
samba; the musical tag at the end, though, is a wonderful example of the multicultural influences on the album - a middle-Eastern
shehnai playing over an African-inspired bed of rhythm, along with a Cuban
tumbao in the bass. • "Disamistade", as the title says [literally "Unfriendship" in
Sardinian, but here intended as
feud], deals with a feud between two families in rural
Sardinia. De André describes them as having no real animosity between each other and desperately making attempts to reconcile, or maybe just to come to terms with the situation - even if they know that all of their attempts will eventually come to either a bloodshed or to nothing at all because of a century-old grudge, so strong and powerful that no-one is able to dissipate it. This is narrated by De André in a deliberately resigned style over a slow,
dirge-like march, marked by the metallic, almost ominous clangs of a Brazilian
berimbau, a
musical bow featuring a single metal string over an emptied gourd. The singer marks the end of every verse with nonsense words ('''ndea-oh, 'ndea-oh
), vaguely sounding like Sardinian but not belonging to that language. A faithful English-language cover of the song was released in 2000 by the American indie folk band The Walkabouts, who included it on their album Train Leaves at Eight''. • The whole of "Â cúmba" (music and lyrics) is based on a traditional Genoese
call-and-response rhyme from the 1800s, and it is entirely sung in Genoese by De André (as "the father"), Fossati (as "the suitor") and a female choir, representing the townspeople. The lyrics are an excited dialogue between the two males, arguing over the elder man's daughter - the "cúmba" of the title, literally translatable as "the dove" and meant as a yet-unmarried girl. • "Ho visto Nina volare" ["I saw Nina flying"] is a sensitive, sweet ballad about a distant past. It is based on the recollections of Giovanna "Nina" Manfieri, a childhood friend of De André's who she first met in 1942, when both of them were two, and with whom she spent her entire childhood. The lyrics, written from a child's point of view, are about the singer's longing to grow up and become independent from his elders, while simultaneously being fearful of the unknown. • "Smisurata preghiera" ["Limitless prayer"], the album closer, is built as a
sea shanty, but musically stronger than the usual examples of the genre. Its subject matter is, yet again, sailors - here described as a race of their own, proudly standing above a generalized, faceless "majority" and obstinately going their own way, against the tide of the mainstream culture; De André would include in this special "mix" all marginalized people - the poor, social outcasts, rebels of many stripes and, indeed, sailors. The song is inspired by and partly based on poems within short stories by
Álvaro Mutis - especially from his 1993 collection "
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll". (Mutis later became De André's friend.) The lines "for the one who travels in a stubborn and opposite direction, / with his special mark of special desperation" sum up the entire album's poetical stance, as well as much of De Andrè's work. The lyrics to the song were originally written in
Colombian Spanish by De André, who condensed several passages from poems by Mutis into a consistent whole; the singer also recorded a Colombian Spanish demo of the song, which was given to Mutis from De André as a gift and never officially released in full (an excerpt from it is featured in the second DVD in the
Dentro Faber series). He was taught the correct South American pronunciation by noted Italian-Argentinian film score composer
Luis Bacalov. The lyrics to the album version are literally translated from the original Spanish lyrics. After De André finishes singing, the song concludes with a 90-second orchestral
coda in
free time, arranged by
Piero Milesi. ==Personnel==