Guendalina Carbonelli Monash University
I cannot remember the first time I came across Fabrizio. I was a child when like many Italians I started to listen to his songs with my parents and my older siblings. At that age his songs were fairytales to me; as I grew up, however, I realised that his songs had a very provocative component.
My academic interest in De André is far more recent, however, and was triggered by the many initiatives that in 2009 were dedicated to the 10th anniversary of his death. The event was celebrated with books, successful tv shows and in particular a touring exhibition which visited Genoa, Rome, Nuoro, Palermo, and Milan between January 2009 and October 2010. 144,000 people went to the exhibition during the first 6 months in Genoa alone and about 150,000 in Nuoro and Rome. Visits by celebrities and politicians helped to boost the wide national response to the exhibition. In 2009 Cristiano De André, Fabrizio’s son and a singer-songwriter himself, started a tour in which he sang his father’s songs. The tour lasted two years and reached an audience of more than 500,000 people. I found all this attention quite unusual, even for a cantautore as popular as De André: I wondered why he was able to generate such a significant level of interest.
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Dear crime fiction lovers, here two more conferences that will take place in 2014: “True Crime. Facts, Fiction, Ideology” Conference, Manchester, 6-7 June 2014; and “Crime Fiction: Here and There and Again”, 2nd International Postgraduate Conference, University of Gdańsk (Poland) and the State School of Higher Professional Education in Elbląg, 11-13 September 2014. The deadline for presenting an abstract for both conferences is 31 March.They both look very interesting. Continue reading 
