A long farewell to Ornella Vanoni, accompanied by Paolo Fresu: "Six years ago, she told me what I should play."

A long farewell, a tribute from friends, artists, and residents, for Ornella Vanoni, the legendary singer who died Friday evening at the age of 91. The funeral service was held today at 3:00 PM in the church of San Marco in Brera, in the neighborhood where she lived in Milan. Thousands of people paid tribute to a symbol of Milanese culture in the chapel of rest, which opened yesterday morning at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi and will remain open until 2:00 PM today. The singer also received tributes from Antonio Marras, Liliana Segre, and Mayor Beppe Sala, as well as from many artists such as Francesco Gabbani, Ambra Angiolini, Paolo Jannacci, Arisa, Fiorella Mannoia, Memo Remigi, Alba Parietti, Simona Ventura, and Gabriele Salvatores.

The ceremony will be to the rhythm of jazz: Vanoni had asked for Paolo Fresu, the trumpeter from Berchidda whom he had known for many years and with whom he had worked on the album "Argilla" in 1997, to play. He had made this clear during one of his appearances on "Che tempo che fa": "I asked Paolo Fresu to play at my funeral."

Today the trumpeter from Berchidda will be called to answer this appeal " but I cannot reveal the piece I will play during the funeral", he told Videolina.

"She called me one morning six years ago," she recalls. "I was in Bologna. I had dropped my son off at school. She revealed her desire to me, telling me what I should play. Something that really struck me. For years I'd had this fear, and I jokingly told her, 'If I die first, you have to come and sing.'"

Fresu, moved, tried to write her a letter before leaving for Milan: "Write something," I ask myself on this empty November morning. "And here I am, throwing scattered thoughts into a Word document, thinking about our first meeting at the Tangram in Milan in the early 1990s and how many times we laughed, cried, sang, and played music over these thirty years. It's almost impossible to talk about Ornella. Impossible to outline a rich life made up of successes and triumphs, falls, ascents, and passions. Write something, but what?"

"Perhaps the best way," the musician continues, "is to find adjectives. Contemporary screenshots that can translate the imaginative into the collective imagination of her being a woman and an artist, which, she always knows, belongs to all of us. Ornella is the emotion of life. Hers and ours. Capable of placing solitude and passion, love for herself and others, the pathos and poetry that will (perhaps) save the world, at the center of the world. An elusive woman who abhorred the obvious and the banal. An artist who shattered the delicate balance between art and life and who made the stage her home, where she could host and dispense human feelings."

"The clock announces it's time to leave for Milan," Fresu writes. "I save these few thoughts and turn off the computer, aware that I haven't been able to write what I wanted to. For example, that he was shaking like a leaf before going on stage, which he then tackled like a lioness. Or the weekly phone calls with his unmistakable voice that always began with 'How are you?' Or the ones with my mother or my wife Sonia."

(Unioneonline/D)