It was Flavia D’Alessio, the wife of the Neapolitan singer-songwriter and cabaret artist Federico Salvatore, who gathered all her strength to announce that her husband is no longer here. She was 64 years old. In October 2021, she suffered a brain hemorrhage and hasn’t recovered since. «They were the most difficult and painful months of our love story – wrote Flavia – months in which I prayed and hoped that he would come home to me and the boys and that he would return to the people who love him and who in recent months have prayed and hoped with me. The hardest thing is managing the pain. Federico left in an hour. It all happened fast. At first I had thought of a private ceremony but it wouldn’t have been right. Federico would not have wanted to. The people who have followed Federico in his artistic career are not simply fans. They are friends with him. All the artists who have collaborated with him have not only been colleagues. They are his friends. It seems right to give them all the opportunity to say goodbye to Federico. Which I couldn’t do. I couldn’t say goodbye to him.” The funeral will be celebrated tomorrow 20 April, at 12.30in the Basilica of San Ciro in Portici.
Career and success with «Azz..»
The “singer”, as Federico liked to call himself, who winked at Giorgio Gaber and Fabrizio De Andrè, immersing all his knowledge in the Neapolitan cultural tradition, suspended between Basile, Di Giacomo, the Squallors and Pino Daniele, there is no more. Federico Salvatore was a true, cultured and popular artist, the prerogative of a few. Every word, every verse that he wrote and sang was “designed”, the result of a popular feeling but also of a lot of culture. His album “AZZ…”, in 1995, with 700,000 copies sold, collected two Platinum Records. Since then successful hit songs and small masterpieces such as “Napolitudine” and “Sulla porta”. And it was precisely this last passage that spoke of homosexuality that was censored in Sanremo. Federico Salvatore was a modern-day storyteller who moved acrobatically, between social denunciations and moments of poetry, entrusted to the listener’s ear like a film montage.