«I want to sing»: the story of those who leave Calabria to study or to work, and carry the voice of home with them all their lives.
The song opens with the beauty of the land, sea, plain and mountain, and at once comes the leaving: the bag to pack, the coach that will not wait, the goodbye to a mother. Then the train, the bridges, villages and stations, and a distant voice announcing the arrival.
Days, months and years go by: sixty of them. You marry, children come, work, some good fortune. But an emptiness remains, the wish to go back and the fear of finding no one left. Salvatore Mazzei wrote it as a young man: at fourteen he had left Castelsilano for Turin.
It is a stand-alone single, not part of the album. Among Calabrian communities abroad it has become the song of those who left, and it has been written about in Chile and Argentina.
Salvatore Mazzei is not a historian: he gathers stories and tells them in music. These lines are a starting point for anyone who wants to look up the sources and form their own view.