Rosa Balistreri


Rosa Balistreri was an Italian singer and musician. Her hoarse voice charged with melancholy and strong personality made her a Sicilian icon of the twentieth century, much like the writer Leonardo Sciascia, the poet Ignazio Buttitta and the painter Renato Guttuso, who counted all three among her admirers.

Biography

Rosa Balistreri was born in Licata, a town in the province of Agrigento, in western declined Sicily, in the late 1920s. Her father was an alcoholic carpenter and Rosa was forced to do menial jobs, instead of going to school. In 1951, after experiencing the Sicily of Leonardo Sciascia's Candido, Rosa left her village at the age of 24 for Tuscany, settling in Florence, where she worked as a domestic servant. Uprooted from her native land, she started her artistic career at 39, through Dario Fo who made her star in one of his shows, Ci ragiono e canto. Rosa recorded her first two albums the following year, in 1967, and performed at Teatro Carignano in Turin, at Teatro Manzoni in Milan and at Teatro Metastasio in Prato. In 1971, now renowned Rosa Balistreri returned after twenty years in Sicily, where she would sing until her death. Often composed in dramatic style, her songs depict Sicily, as her friend Leonardo Sciascia describes, as "violent, tender, bitter, sweet, full of ambiguities". The "Soprano of the South", as Ignazio Buttitta nicknamed her, related the misfortunes but also the beauties and mysteries of the three-pointed island. She also embodied, as her friends Amalia Rodrigues, Renato Guttuso and Leonardo Sciascia, a generation of artists joining the communist ideology.
Rosa Balistreri died in Palermo in 1990 at the age of 63, but her work survives and is modernized through the interpretations of Serena Rispoli, Carmen Consoli, and especially Etta Scollo who, accompanied by the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra, performs her most iconic songs, such as "'U cunigghiu", "I pirati a Palermu" or "Cu ti lu dissi".

Discography