The collaboration with the poet Roberto Roversi was a decisive collaboration for the maturation of Lucio Dalla. As a musician, first and foremost, but also as a (future) lyricist. “If I hadn't met Roversi, I would be a plumber now,” the Bolognese singer-songwriter joked in an interview given two years before leaving us. Together, they gave life to a memorable trilogy that revolutionized Italian song, dismantling the traditional verse-chorus formula and replacing it with a peculiar flow of music and poetry, undoubtedly experimental but never unrealistic or an end in itself.
Roversi was the man of providence for Dalla, who, since the days of “Lucio dove vai” (1967), experienced a sort of dissociation between his true self and his public figure. Not satisfied with success, the Bolognese singer-songwriter was looking for a “third way” for Italian song: a middle ground between the ideological songwriting of Pietrangeli, Guccini and Lolli and pop music. And his ambition pushed him to want to tell direct, raw and disarming stories, capable of opening a window on society, ridiculing the arrogance and contradictions of power. Roversi managed to satisfy his aspiration by marrying realism and poetry. With unprecedented points of harshness, as in the case of this cult song from the second chapter of the trilogy, “Sulfur Dioxide” (1975). An album which, after all, should have been titled “The year is a fire”, to tell “the unstoppable violence of this time”, in the words of Roversi himself. A violence that, in this case, does not spare even the smallest and most defenseless.
 |
Roversi often drew inspiration from the news for his poems. In this case, what struck him was the terrible Churchville news case of 1971, which involved a 10-year-old girl: Carmen Colon was kidnapped on November 16 in the city of Rochester, New York; she was found dead two days later near Churchville, six kilometers away. It was the first of the three crimes of the man who was called theAlphabet Killer: all three little victims, in fact, had the initial initial of their name identical to that of their surname. Two years later Carmen Colon was in fact the turn of Wanda Walkowicz, aged eleven, and Michelle Maenza, also aged eleven. Furthermore, the killer ensured that the girls' bodies were found in locations whose names also began with the same letter as their first and last names: Carmen Colon in Churchville on November 18, 1971, Wanda Walkowicz in Webster on April 3, 1973, and Michelle Maenza on November 28, 1973 in Macedon.
THE'Alphabet Killer he was never found. The FBI questioned more than a hundred people, but only a few seemed to have real knowledge of the facts. Among these was an individual, never publicly identified, listed at the time as a “person of interest”: he took his own life six weeks after the last murder. His name was removed from the register of suspects only in 2007, when DNA testing ruled out any involvement. In the case of Carmen Colon, the only suspect was the victim's uncle, but the scant traces left by the killer prevented his guilt from being ascertained, as also happened for the other main suspect. The man committed suicide in 1991.
The song is a heartbreaking reconstruction of Carmen Colon's ordeal, but also a very harsh reprimand on the indifference of a society that forgets to protect and protect the most defenseless. The persuasive country musicality of the arrangements and Dalla's intense vibrato accompany the heartbreaking description of the last moments of the little girl's life, with the pounding anaphora “Carmen Colon” repeated obsessively, restoring all the sense of pain caused by such an early and violent death. Roversi imagines the little gypsy abandoned as waste on the side of the road (the body was found in a canal near Interstate 490) in the indifference of cars speeding towards the sea, only to be used by the media to unleash a wave of collective emotion:
Oh Carmen Colon
this little girl and death
they move the TV.
Big headlines above the newspapersCarmen Colon
he is the twentieth victim
among the purple bins of August
his body is hidden under a sheetCarmen Colon
no one stopped for her
nor did they give her any help or a hand
they ran away towards the sea
“Carmen Colon” was certainly not a hit, but it struck a chord with all the fans of the Bolognese singer-songwriter. And it didn't go unnoticed even by the police. Roversi was even summoned to Rome by Interpol for questioning on the facts, since some details of the descriptions in the text were apparently hidden from the public by the investigators. But the poet clarified the enigma by showing the investigators the newspaper clippings on which he had based himself to write the text.
The partnership between Dalla and Roversi ended – not without some controversial consequences – after the third chapter of the trilogy, “Cars”. Clashes and reconciliations will follow. Until the hatchet is finally buried. “What attracted me to Lucio Dalla more than his human and artistic intolerance was his intolerance towards normal standards – Roversi acknowledged in 2007 – Dalla is a man, as well as an artist and a singer, always one step ahead of his own body. He tramples on his own shadow which is in front of him and not behind his back and is therefore a miraculous experimenter”. “From Roversi I learned everything – Lucio will admit again – to write my own words, but above all else pure emotion”.
Precisely after that historic trilogy, Dalla will give life to three consecutive masterpieces (“How deep is the sea”, “Lucio Dalla”, “Dalla”), interspersed with the historic tour of “Banana Republic” with Francesco De Gregori, definitively establishing himself as one of the main Italian singer-songwriters of all time. Never, however, will he return to sing a song as hard and heartbreaking as “Carmen Colon”. A song that cannot fail to give you chills and inexorably move you every time you listen to it again.
24/10/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
