With us two types of travellers. The first is the one who is only happy traveling between two places, the one he has just left and the one he is about to reach (the place itself is indifferent); the second is that which makes the pleasure of traveling depend on his mental attitude and not on the destination. And then there is Young peopleoften traveling to get to know new places or to escape from something, frankly I don’t know: «In an age of sad passions, traveling is a form of militancy. We are bombarded with news, it seems that the world is reaching us, but it is necessary to reach the world. Man must stay where he can to flourishdo not wither».
Travel begins in Central Park, NY, with a tribute to the monument of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German naturalist and explorer (the greatest scientist traveler of all time, according to Darwin). With a cell phone and an action cam, Jovanotti filmed his solo travel (over 70 hours of video material later edited by Michele Lugaresi), 3500 kilometers long, from the Andes to the Amazon, from Ecuador to Colombia. Seventy hours of filming condensed into 22 episodes of 15 minutes each: a docu-trip entitled “Aracatacaâ€, second chapter of #I don’t want to change the planet, on RaiPlay. For the record, Aracataca is the small town in Colombia where he was born Gabriel Garcia Marquezthat of “One Hundred Years of Solitude».
Jovanotti, whatever he does, has the advantage of arouse sympathy even among the most critical observers, after having struggled quite a bit to be admitted to the assembly of those “of whom people speak well”, after having found with age the right balance between energy force and that of doubt. It doesn’t matter what he shows us, despite his travel diary he gives us unprecedented glimpses, villages and suburbs, dirt and paved roads (anyone is now able to film); it matters rather how he shows them to us, as if each shot were soaked of tea made with coca leaves (it’s good coca, no alarm).
The funniest scene? Jovanotti meets a busker who doesn’t know his songs. «Bella» is heard from the cell phone and the two sing, but while he is pointing the plateau the lips mimic the airplane.