Summer Amarcord between Riccione during the 20s and the neon lights of Miami. Interview with Renzo Arbore

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Once upon a time there was the bourgeois holiday that began in June, ended in September and emptied the cities; there was heat without red dots; the August storms were not called "water bombs" but downpours; the aunts waved their fans to to relieve the heat; summer sweat, as obvious as the chirping of cicadas, was not associated with “weather warnings” but with lemon popsicles.

Renzo Arbore , back on TV from 10th July with the restored re-edition of his classic “Dear Friends Near and Far Away” (every Thursday on Rai 3 in the late evening), clearly recalls those less neurotic seasons, which exuded emotions in which one can immerse oneself with nostalgia.

The first holiday? Riccione was the place of my childhood: my father had chosen it partly because my grandmother was from Bologna, partly because it had the busiest beach in Italy . The family left by train from Foggia with trunks of household goods, facing a journey that seemed to last forever. America: we would get on the express train in the evening, I would see the sunrise in Pescara and in the afternoon we would arrive at our destination to settle into the rented house in the Abissinia neighborhood. Many years later, talking to Romano Mussolini, I learned that it was one of the very few properties his family owned in Riccione.

Which was the Duce's beach. I saw it when I was about five years old: my father picked me up and pointed out a man dressed in white who was greeting people in front of his villa. It made an impression on me, about fifteen years ago, when I entered that house for a meeting between DJs. The apparition reawakened

childish.

They were already war holidays. What do you remember? In the summer of '43 we moved to Francavilla al Mare with all our relatives, thirty-five people, when the armistice was announced on September 8th. It seemed like the end of the war and I found myself with the Friulian nanny in the little square where everyone was cheering, then we went to Lanciano which seemed safer, but my father risked a bad end because he was captured by the Germans. When they released him, three days later, we evacuated to Chieti and stayed there until the Allies arrived. I saw the Germans retreating and the American jeeps entering from the other side of the city, in a jubilation of the crowd.

Did you return to Riccione? After a break in Siponto in Puglia, we resumed our holidays in Riccione: we were the only southerners on a beach invaded by Swiss tourism. What a contrast with Foggia, still full of rubble from the bombings. And what a contrast between the casual

Bolognese holidaymakers and my very covered fellow citizens. In Riccione there were pinball machines, dance halls, a riding school, tennis courts where I learned to play and a skating rink: my idol was Mimma Gaspari, the best local skater, who would be became a record producer and lyricist . However, as a teenager I would change seas: from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian. My parents wanted to introduce their children to new places and we landed in Versilia, in Lido di Camaiore. I rode my bicycle between Viareggio, Marina di Massa, Forte dei Marmi. I had a girlfriend and discovered night clubs. I heard for the first time the Dutch guitarist Peter Van Wood and the group Franco ei “G.5”, which was said to be the Agnellis' favorite. We were staying at the Cavalluccio Marino hotel and one day, at the next table, a guy who looked like a mountaineer came to eat, declaiming ambitious projects. He would make them come true: he was Sergio Bernardini, the inventor of the Bussola, where big names would pass by and where I saw Aretha Franklin perform.

Then came the adult summers. When I settled in Naples for university I frequented Ischia, but above all Sorrento in the villa of my friend Gerardo Gargiulo. They were the first holidays on a boat, hunting for foreigners. I was the most shy, while the most combative was a young lawyer who

he would call the hotel doormen: “What’s on today?”. “Lawyer, twenty English women and ten Spanish women have arrived, but I don’t recommend these because they all have mass booklets…”. He didn’t try anything with Italian women because they inevitably wanted to get engaged.

Did he get engaged? With a girl who occasionally returned to Naples where she had a friend, a certain Luciano De Crescenzo. When I met him we discovered that she had been with both of us at the same time. With Luciano the center of gravity would move to Capri, together with Alberto Crocetta, the creator of the Piper. The island was experiencing a wonderful phase, between the last existentialists and the bizarre characters that Totò caricatured. I knew it because I had worked there in the summer of 1962 playing at the Number Two, opposite the Quisisana. I performed a Cuban, Italian and English repertoire, but I had to return to Foggia because of the death of my grandfather Lorenzo, to whom I was very close. I would have made a regular stop in Capri with Luciano: he had christened the boat “'O fatt'apposta” because he used it for towing. I was with Mariangela Melato and in the evening we went to taverns to listen to music.

Summers abroad? In Miami Beach when it was still the Tropical Deco, the vintage shops and you could swim everywhere. It was the America I liked, of a twentieth century that despite everything was a wonderful century . The invention of jazz also marked the style of my programs, which are basically jam sessions of words. But if we talk about music there is also French music from the fifties, Brazilian music, especially Italian and Neapolitan music. Now they have rediscovered the Neapolitan classics, but when he no longer sang them

Nobody did it with the Italian Orchestra.

A song that is the emblem of summer? If I have to choose just one, it is “Taste of Salt”.

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