Giorgio Gaber /

Giorgio Gaber, byname of Giorgio Gaberscik (25 January 1939 - 1 January 2003), was an Italian singer-songwriter, actor and playwright. He was also an accomplished guitar player and author of one of the first rock songs in Italian ("Ciao ti dirò", 1958). Together with Sandro Luporini, he pioneered the musical genre known as teatro canzone ("song theatre"). The new underground auditorium of the Pirelli Tower in Milan is dedicated to him. He was born in Milan into a lower middle-class family. The surname Gaberscik is of Slovene origin. His mother was from the Veneto region. The two met and married in Veneto and later moved to Milan, where Giorgio was born. Subsequently he began to frequent the Santa Tecla, a venue in Milan where he had the chance to meet musicians of the time, including Luigi Tenco, Gianfranco Reverberi, Adriano Celentano, Ricky Gianco, and Mogol, who obtained a contract for Gaber with Dischi Ricordi. In 1969 he set one of his best known successes, "Com'è bella la città" ("How Beautiful the City Is"), an example of the introduction of social matters in a song. The following year, he showed at Piccolo teatro his first ediction of Il Signor G ("Mister G"), a recital he repeated in many Italian squares. In 1974 he was given the Premio Tenco in the first edition of that musical award. Later Gaber also received the Targa Tenco in 2001 for his song "La razza in estinzione" ("The Dying Race") and in 2003 for the album Io non mi sento italiano ("I Don't Feel Italian"). After the Tenco award Gaber abandoned television and began to tour only in theatres, as one of the founders of the teatro canzone genre. He would appear again in TV, although sporadically, only in the 1990s and early 2000s. Giorgio Gaber died, after a long illness, on 1 January 2003 in his country house in Montemagno near Camaiore (Lucca, Tuscany).