Article and photos by Alessandro Amendolara
At six in the evening on Sunday I was sitting in a stream in the Aosta Valley with people who, twelve hours earlier, I had simply passed. The shoes thrown on the stones, the beers passed from hand to hand, the feet now anesthetized by the torrent and easy chats as if we had known each other forever. Looking back, the concert of Cosmos it had already been over for a while. Yet I had the feeling that it was still there. Not in the mountains. Not even among the Bluetooth speakers. But among those people.
Twelve hours earlier, at six in the morning, we were probably climbing the same steps of the Bard Fort together. A long line of strangers towards a concert that would start when you normally prepare your coffee while yawning. The mountain air stung my lungs (and the choice to do a running race with a girl half my age wasn't the best). Someone was still holding their sweatshirt tight (me), someone else was looking for their first coffee of the day (always me), someone else was prudently stopping at the bathrooms before entering the area with the stage (always very strongly me). However, no one seemed bothered by the early rise. On the contrary. There was that strange excitement that only belongs to the occasions for which it is worth doing something apparently senseless.
Maybe it was right there that I understood the first thing about this Matinee: The concert was not the destination. It was the beginning.
Having actively entered the Fort, I join the crowd of stoics who are already manning the barrier under the checkout before seven in the morning. The prize for waking up at dawn is the final part of the pre-live: Cosmos gives us a very sweet cover of Ever New by Beverly Glenn-Copeland. A song from the late 1980s which was originally a sacred and ethereal song that speaks of transformation and rebirth, but which with this rearrangement turns into the first of many cuddles that will warm up our matinee.
The actual concert opens philologically with Go back to the source: if certain artists open to try to win you over, Cosmo instead seems to start from the assumption that you are already there and invites you to enter without immediately turning up the volume. Then he gently greets us with HIthe farewell to all previous versions of ourselves. He talks about contemporary fatherhood by photographing the province with Talponia and praises that love which has now ceased to belong only to those who wrote When I met you (“I slept just over three hours and now here I am“, yeah…), all supported by the voice of Pan Dan and by the musical direction of Not Waving.
The concert comes to life with the introspective story: Cosmos it temporarily sets aside the straight case and leaves room for bonds, fragilities and doubts. He does it through the praise of those borderline affects that almost never end up in songs – For a friend And For my brother – passing through the reassuring self-delusion of Everything OKthe gentle nihilism of The endthe stubborn search for a place in the world in Exist and the emotional toll of Totem and taboountil even exhumed Wittgensteinabsent from his live setlists for thirteen years. More than a sequence of songs, it seems like a session of collective self-awareness: the singer from Ivrea continually lowers the volume of the ego to raise that of relationships, vulnerability and questions. It is perhaps the moment in which the concert definitively stops being a performance and becomes a light conversation, almost like those that can be had during summer bonfires.
It is precisely in this block that one of the most intense moments of the Matinee arrives: the interweaving acoustic medley Love, The voices, The rarest things and a very delicate one The hill of cherry trees by Lucio Battisti. A choice that can hardly be considered casual. “La Fonte”, in fact, is perhaps the album in which the Baptist influence emerges most naturally and Cosmo himself describes it as “the second chapter of a journey that began with “On the wings of the white horse” and destined to find completion in a third work arriving soon“.
But it is above all the way in which this medley takes shape that makes it so powerful. The artist renounces everything on stage that could serve as a safety net for him: no synths, no sequences, no electronics. What remains is a guitar, his voice and thousands of people who, almost in a whisper, end up singing along with him. For a few minutes the Bard Fort stops being the setting for a concert and becomes the living room of a gigantic extended family. That's where Cosmos he leaves room for Marco: looking towards the audience, he confesses that he gets more and more excited “date after date”, despite being convinced that he has now learned the trade. To make that moment even more authentic there is also the presence of his family, there together with all of us. And in that moment it becomes difficult to understand where the concert ends and where life begins: the answer is given to me by my prosecco neighbors, who insert me into their emotional embrace.
From this moment on the Matinee changes skin. After stripping everything in the acoustic medley, Cosmo returns to electronics without losing the intimacy built up until a few minutes before. Talking to you, All a mess, The hug And Us they seem to tell four different ways of being together, until arriving at what is probably the song that most of all contributed to defining the artist's imagination.
When the first notes of The last party (arranged with Macarena loops), time seems to play a strange trick. In 2016 he talked about the almost desperate desire not to let a night end. Today, almost ten years later, that same song seems to talk about something else. No longer the fear that a party will end, but the luck of being able to live it again. With a few more gray hairs (mine), a few fewer certainties (mine) and an awareness that was probably missing then: certain songs don't age because, in the meantime, we age. And every time they tell us something different.
From then on, Forte di Bard becomes a huge open-air dancefloor. A festive Monday, Moments, You are my city demonstrate once again how Cosmo manages to do something that, in Italy, very few continue to succeed in: transforming dance into an emotional language. Because in his music the dancefloor is never a place to forget reality. It is, if anything, a different way of going through it.
The intensity doesn't drop even when the concert slows down again Regatta 70, Sails in the wind And The other world. On the contrary. It is precisely here that Cosmo interrupts the music to make the most political gesture of the entire morning. He wraps himself in the Palestinian flag and utters a few dry words that do not seek applause or consensus: “If genocide in front of cameras is possible, then this world is rotten“. No rally, no rhetoric. Only the choice to remember that, outside the walls of the Fort, there exists a world that continues to ask not to be ignored.
The last act opens with On the wings of the white horseperhaps the song that best describes today's Cosmos. A suspended, almost mystical song, which does not seek explosion but contemplation and which paves the way for Every day/every night, Enchantment, Come and see and to the very delicate The flower blooms. More than an ending, it seems like a farewell. Not that of an artist who greets his audience, but that of someone who, after having accompanied you for almost three hours, lets you go with the feeling of still having something to tell you.
Cosmos it's everything you expect when you no longer expect anything. Not because he continues to chase surprise or feels the need to reinvent himself with each album. On the contrary. Because he seems to have achieved that rare artistic serenity that allows him to remove rather than add, to slow down when everyone speeds up, to rely on the songs without the need to continually prove something. The more the years pass, the more interested he seems in sharing rather than impressing.
Outside the Fort we find those who, until a few hours earlier, were simply those with whom we had shared the Matinee. We sang the same refrains, applauded the same silences, danced under the same speakers. Someone suggests an impromptu lunch, someone else a swim in the stream. Within a few minutes we are all in the car heading to the same destination. As if the concert had found another way to continue.
A few hours later we are all with our feet immersed in the freezing water of a stream in the Aosta Valley. Until that morning we were only dawn companions in front of the same stage. Now we laugh like the naturalness of old friends. I think back to the beginning of the Matinee and finally understand. “Ritornare alla source” wasn't just the first song in the setlist. It was an invitation. Because, ultimately, the rarest things they are still the ones that cannot be programmed. Fortunately.
COSMO – The lineup of “La Fonte” Matinee Tour 2026
Ever New (prelive: cover by Beverly Glenn-Copeland)
Go back to the source
HI
Talponia
When I met you
For a friend
For my brother
Everything OK
The end
Exist
Totem and taboo
Wittgenstein
Love / Voices / The rarest things / The cherry hill (acoustic medley, with cover by Lucio Battisti)
Talking to you
All a mess
The hug
Us
The last party
A festive Monday
Moments
You are my city
Regatta 70
Sails in the wind
The other world
On the wings of the white horse
Every day/every night
Enchantment
Come and see
The flower blooms
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
