The cultivation of flowers on the Ligurian coast takes us back to the second half of the 19th century when gardeners on the Riviera used to load large baskets of roses and carnations onto trains bound for the far reaches of the continent: The European aristocracy, so we are told, simply couldn’t resist these flowers whose fragrance bespoke the Mistral wind of Sanremo (San Remo), which still today holds the national record in this sector.
In 2022 the University of Turin used artificial intelligence to process the Sanremo Song Festival’s 1,741 songs from 1951 onwards, according to the eight basic emotions defined in American psychologist Plutchik’s “Wheel of Emotions”, i.e. trust, surprise, disgust, joy, anger, fear, sadness and anticipation. The result is quite predictable and applies to the entire flowerbed of songs: that which rhymes with ‘feel-good’ takes the lion’s share; in other words, songs that feature a ‘positivity bias’ with reassuring melodies will be hummed by all and sundry and eagerly seized upon by both the new and old media.
In 2010 the Accademia della Crusca (Italy’s linguistic academy) confirmed, using analogical methods, that “love” is by far the most recurrent word at the top of a virtual ‘hit parade’.
However, the fact remains that despite this garden of delights, the Sanremo sentiment hits several sore notes: sometimes it’s either lost or withered, or else it requires one to beware of thorns and, especially, unfaithful lovers.
Therefore, seeing as there is one successful duo that has never been out of tune – “Dog and Fidelity” – how about putting sentiment on a lead in order to solve the problem at, ahem, the “root”?