1984: Genoese Goes Global

When Fabrizio De André and Mauro Pagani released “Creuza de mä” in 1984, it looked like a gamble: an entire album in Genoese, set to Mediterranean instruments. It turned out to be a revolution: the record won the Targa Tenco, David Byrne picked it in Rolling Stone among the ten best albums of the 1980s worldwide, and in Liguria it marks a watershed between twentieth-century “dialect” song and the new experimentation in Genoese.

The creusa of the title is the narrow walled lane running down to the sea. From there, Genoese travelled everywhere – proof that a “local” language can speak to the whole world.