What makes an artist a diva? Certainly the popularity and the ability to ignite the fantasies and imagination of the public. Furthermore, a diva must be both close and unattainable, understandable and alien, imitable in some traits but inimitable in its complexity and totality. A diva must then carry within herself a diversity that makes her unique.
Milva had these qualities: she was and continues to be a diva. Witness the hundreds of records he has recorded in a fifty-year career. This is testified by the collaborations with distant personalities such as Astor Piazzolla, Franco Battiato, Enzo Jannacci, Giorgio Strehler. Witness the ability to go from the theater of Bertold Brecht, to the television variety, passing through a recital at La Scala and an "episode" in Sanremo (actually she has been there 15 times!) always remaining, constantly, profoundly Milva. Milva with her unmistakable voice as unmistakable were the movements on stage, the looks, the smiles, the movement of the eyelashes and the sudden twirling of the long red hair.
The beautiful book dedicated to her by her daughter Martina Corgnati, not surprisingly entitled "Milva. The last diva" (La nave di Teseo editore, 2023, euro 20, pp. 256. Also Ebook) represents an opportunity to approach the great artist retracing her long human and artistic adventure that saw her protagonist of many departures and restarts, of new beginnings after a previous experience was exhausted.In what is a real autobiography - given the closeness between mother and daughter, between author and protagonist of the book - there are the beginnings of what in the registry office was called Maria Ilva Biolcati, from Goro, province of Ferrara, born in 1939. There are the beginnings in the dance halls, the first successes, the hit parade singer of the sixties of the twentieth century Then Maria Ilva became in all respects Milva, dedicating herself to the theater, to committed song. She had the strength to look beyond the reassuring borders of the Belpaese to present herself internationally, thus becoming a star in a country like Germany, where our singers have never made a splash, and performing almost everywhere, from Paris to Japan. In this continuous search for a dimension that would not make her go out of fashion, she often changed her existence, at least five times according to Martina Corgnati's story, accompanying herself to new people, treading different stages and accepting challenges that intrigued her.
Of these five lives, Martina Corgnati's book offers an intense, intimate story, which however does not hide the complexity of the woman and the artist, as the author recalls in the preface of the volume when she defines Milva, her mother: "An interpreter of exceptional talent, versatility, sensitivity and musical qualities, who is also [...] a complicated, impulsive, demanding, selfish and generous woman, rarely happy: a woman who from her twenties to her eighties was submerged by her own public image, so broad and cumbersome that left her with relatively little room to find herself.” But how could it have been otherwise since it was a diva?
