“A sort of short film about a love story and a better, hopeful place to escape to, to get away from this pandemic in which we can no longer embrace each other, in which everything that belonged to us has fled”. This is how singer Stefano Del Bravo presents his cover of Via, Claudio Baglioni’s historic hit arranged by Geoff Westley and released as part of the 1981 album “Strada facendo”. After the success of his previous song Scusami, Del Bravo is back on the music scene with this cover with an urban beat (arranged by Ciro Princevibe Pisanelli). As the singer-songwriter says, the idea of paying homage to Baglioni came about “together with the desire to introduce a musical masterpiece like Via to the new generations. It was also the song with which, at the age of 16, I took part in my first music competition. In 2003,” he added, “I was actually lucky enough to be able to acquire ‘The Traveller’s Chair’ at an Amnesty International charity auction, the only object auctioned by Baglioni in favour of human rights, which was featured on the cover of the album ‘Traveller on the Tail of Time’ and was the main protagonist of the tour of the same name, which marked the beginning of the new millennium”

The chair features as a key element in Del Bravo’s video clip (produced by Pulsart Company BMGI Records in the person of Emiliano Boschetti with a screenplay by Marisa Brogna and the direction of Patrizia Mottola), which also finds parallels with the author and with the special guest of the film, Michelangelo Pistoletto. “Via and its combination of three letters, two vowels and a consonant, fits perfectly into the three loops of Pistoletto’s Third Paradise symbol, which in recent years we have seen appear on the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, in orbit in the Italian spaceship with Nespoli, on the cosmonaut’s suit, in the ocean on transatlantic ships, as well as on the pyramids in South America, in Cuba, in New York and in more than 100 museums around the world,” argued Del Bravo in the dedicated press note, “hence the idea of involving him, the world’s leading exponent of Arte Povera. To be honest, I didn’t think he would accept at first, but he did”. The process of linking art and music is not new to the author: Stefano Del Bravo has been involved in art and publishing for years (he is in charge of special projects for the well-known publishing house Scripta Maneant) and so he wanted to accompany his new single with a video clip capable of bringing these two worlds together, as was the case for La macchina del tempo (Time machine), filmed in the studio of painter Mark Kostabi and in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

The film, which shows an introspective play of mirrors between past and future, features not only Del Bravo and Pistoletto himself but also Kevin Ferrareis and Gaia Boschetti. As mentioned, the traveller’s chair is the key element in the video clip (which we show at the end of the article), “because demopraxy, which is the ultimate manifesto of the poetics of Pistoletto’s work, addresses the themes of time and human responsibility,” says Del Bravo, “the chair has bridged the gap between the past, the present and the future of Baglioni’s record and was (and is) a poor symbol, which had and still has much in common with Pistoletto’s mirror, which he claims is a time machine, just like the traveller’s chair. Through the fractals of Pistoletto’s shattered mirrors, we can travel through the time of life and images, it was therefore easy to try to travel in time also with music and in music. The desire to take off and start again is strong,” concluded the singer “but Via is also about escaping, leaving, turning the page, going towards a new beginning”.