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Lucio Dalla
Lucio Dalla · 1979 · Track 7
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The story behind
The lyrics begin with a question that seems taken from a ship's log: Ma come fanno i marinai. Lucio Dalla and Francesco De Gregori turned it into a 45 giri that RCA Italiana released in November 1978, but the real mystery isn’t in the release, it’s in how two such distinct voices captured the loneliness that haunts those who find no direction. The song speaks of sailors kissing on deck, fleeting loves that repeat like routes on a map, and a sea that tastes of nothing after so much sailing. It’s not a complicated metaphor, but a raw portrait of people who keep losing themselves in the same port, forced to move forward even without a compass.
It all started in a café after lunch, between chats and espresso cups, with Ron as an unwitting witness. They recorded it at a time when Dalla had already moved past the clarinet and James Brown-style vocal runs, but hadn’t yet fully defined his voice as a singer-songwriter. The track ended up on the 1979 album Lucio Dalla — the same one that closed his "trilogy of maturity" alongside Come è profondo il mare (1977) and Dalla (1980) — and later traveled to other compilations, like the 1981 Greatest Hits or LucioDallaLive - La neve con la luna. The cover, all black with the names in white, seemed to announce that there were no frills here: just two guys talking about what no one else dared to say.