Chronicles from a Holographic Festival: Sanremo 2025
It was inevitable. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Sanremo, the last secular collective ritual of the country, has turned into an old projector that keeps playing the same film. Sure, there are minor variations—a slightly different angle, a misplaced note, a teary eye by mistake. But the Festival remains still, frozen in time. With its liturgy of sequins, amplified voices, and applause that seem to come straight from an era when artists still brought their hearts to the stage, not the barcode of a stylist. The Festival: the grand spectacle of sameness.
Lucio Corsi ironing his t-shirt, via Lucio Corsi’s instagram @lucio_corsi © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Conti’s Sanremo is like a ghost town meticulously rebuilt for tourists: everything is in place, everything is reassuring, but if you get close enough, you can tell that the heart of the kermesse no longer beats. The lyrics all seem written by the same exhausted pen, money-churning machines, and the songs—except for a few rare exceptions such as Cristicchi, Brunori, and a few remnants of hip-hop trying to carve out space—feel like neatly filled-out forms, crafted with diligence but devoid of desperation. No one dares too much anymore, no one takes risks. The Festival is the perfect reflection of the current state of Italian music: an industry that bets on microtrends and a healthy dose of television nepotism, hoping that something authentic still manages to slip through the cracks.
What is most stifling in this 2025 edition is the total absence of tension. Where once there were sparks—an ill-advised joke, an abrupt walk-off, a fierce controversy (see Bugo’s infamous exit)—now there is the composure of an '80s variety show. Social conflicts, when they do appear, arrive pre-packaged so as not to disturb anyone. Even identities, if they exist, are softened, groomed, made digestible. And yet, some personalities still shine through. In a corner of the stage, there was him. Lucio Corsi, with his tattered jackets, the same old T-shirts, and his gaze lost in another time, another dimension. A foreign body, perhaps. But precisely for that reason, the only living element in an overly composed picture.
But he wasn’t the only one trying to escape. Some do it through music, others by adopting a less submissive attitude towards the Festival’s invisible rules. Serena Brancale, for instance, managed to bring something resembling a spark of real life onto the stage: an aware stage presence, an energy that wasn’t just mere professionalism. Willie Peyote, with his irreverence, tried to shake up some of the automatism. But these are isolated cases, fragments of vitality that aren’t enough to overturn a system where predictability has become a production necessity.
Maybe that’s the real secret: not trying to change the structure, not deluding ourselves that the Festival can be different, but inserting oneself as a perfectly misplaced grain of sand. Sanremo 2025 is a well-crafted hologram, an appearance sustained by rituals that never change.
But amid all those controlled reflections, in the end, all it took was a bag of chips tucked under a shoulder pad to remind us that, somewhere, something real still exists.
