Until the death of Raffaella Carrà (Bologna, 1943-Rome 2021), there was the theory that Jordi Hurtado and she were immortal television beings. Not only because they were in our receivers forever, but because their physical deterioration was almost imperceptible. The death of the Italian led us to think that, at least she, was mortal.
Raffaella Carrà wanted to make her way as a film actress, but her destiny was to be a star of television, of RAI first and then of a large part of the Spanish-speaking world. The appearances in the seventies on our television achieved a magnet effect that was impossible to neutralize. Regardless of her age or sex, you stood still watching her dance, sing, talk, smile, and give herself to the audience as if it was the last time you and she would see each other. In reality, he did all this half well, but he had the lethal weapon of professional honesty, without any imposture in his sympathy, his modesty, his lively eyes and that Italian-style laugh. It was a format absolutely for all audiences, because in addition it did not communicate any type of sexuality, as if in the still carpet-vetonic Spain of those years, showing her body and herself, her wild hair in full exorcist ecstasy, was just what she was: a free woman. I’m like that I’m not looking for anything. Have a good time. let me be Let’s be in peace.
In 1978 Tanto Auguri (Happy Birthday) was first published in Italian and then Hay que venir al Sur in Spanish. The composer of the song and the singer’s first husband was Gianni Boncompagni, and it was clearly a song about sexual freedom and giving a ticket to whoever left you, and looking for candidates without any moral drama for middle Have fun, ladies, with carpe diem.
Raffaella was from the north, from Bologna. Also the composer. The only thing that led to the determination that love is made better in the south (beyond the fact that they had a friend living in Euskadi) was a matter of rhyme. In both the Italian and Spanish versions, if the essence of the song’s motto was: “Lo importante es con quien quieras TÚ”, the previous verse had to rhyme. In Spanish, it would be “para hacer bien el amor hay que venir al SUR”, and in Italian: “Commè e bello fer l’amore de Trieste in GIÚ”, that is to say “How beautiful it is to make love in Trieste no down”. In other words, if the rhyme had been different, we might be saying that to make love you have to go to Ferrol.
The differences between the two versions also show those that existed in two sociologically similar societies, but one of which, two minutes away from a forty-year dictatorship. In both versions, it’s about sexual freedom, to do it with whoever you want and that if you’ve been dumped, you keep trying beds until you find what you’re looking for. But while in the Italian version the same title congratulated the one who had made promiscuity a way of life, it also spoke of the possibility of a woman leaving her partner for pure sexual routine (“My life is a roulette of the que sabes mis números” or “Mi cuerpo es una alfombra sobre la que tú te dormirás”), and yes, it talks about hatred and war, arguing and fighting as something that, in a relationship, can be allowed, if then there is good sex or as she says more romantically: “Quando a letto l’amore c’è”.
The Spanish version knows which society it is aimed at. Here we are already talking about vagabond hearts, about being left behind, about a woman alone and free (it was difficult for this to sink in, but it did sink in), with the moral warning that “innocence is lost”, that is, divorced, separated, unmarried and badly married, suitcases and on the train to the South to find a lover who turns out to be better than the previous one (in Italy, there is talk of a more handsome one, in Spain, a better one. Good sociology). The song, with slight disco touches, and dislocations of the back of the neck, fits when it touches – aided by some unnecessary arpeggios of flaming guitar – the red button of Andalusia, this weakness in the Hispanic, catharsis, wound and destiny not in the Universal but in the staff. Around here, everyone understood what Carrà was talking about, from the South as mental liberation, similar to that of the cowboys who cross, fleeing, all of Texas so that, having crossed the Mexican border, they stay for months in a cantina to be found and killed but, at least, being alive. That glorious southern lucidity: “everyone says that love is the friend of madness, but to me, who is crazy, it is the only thing that cures me”. How do you see it, Erasmus of Rotterdam?
