Il centro del mondo

About the song

«Il centro del mondo» arrived on 9 May 2008 as the first of three brand-new songs written for «Secondo tempo», the second half of Luciano Ligabue’s two-part anthology. It was released by Warner Music Italy as a single on CD and as a digital download three weeks before the collection itself, which reached the shops on 30 May 2008. Ligabue wrote both the words and the music. The production was handled by Corrado Rustici, one of the most sought-after Italian producers of the period, who also arranged the track together with the singer, and the recording and mixing were done by David Fraser at The Plant Studios in Sausalito, California. Rustici played guitars and keyboards himself, with Michael Urbano on drums, Sean Hurley on bass and Frank Martin on piano. The result is a pop-rock ballad of a little over four minutes that opens quietly and builds towards a wide, anthemic chorus.

By 2008 Ligabue had been a household name in Italy for almost twenty years. Born in Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia, on 13 March 1960, he had started out in 1987 with an amateur band called Orazero and released his first album, simply titled «Ligabue», in 1990. Songs such as «Balliamo sul mondo», «Ho perso le parole» and above all «Certe notti» turned him into the standard-bearer of Italian rock; «Certe notti» was later voted the Italian song of the 1990s in a magazine poll. He is also a film-maker: his directorial debut «Radiofreccia» won three David di Donatello awards in 1999 and earned him a Nastro d’Argento as best new director, and he went on to direct «Da zero a dieci» and «Made in Italy». In September 2005 he gathered an audience of around 180,000 people in Reggio Emilia, a European record for a single paying artist at the time.

The lyric of «Il centro del mondo» is built almost entirely out of requests. The singer keeps asking the person he loves to take him somewhere — anywhere at all, from a distant continent to the nearest bar, from the sea to a planet — and to show him what it really means to set off, to travel light, to travel with his heart rather than with his luggage. Ligabue himself explained the idea in an interview with the weekly «Sorrisi e Canzoni»: the effects of love, he said, are enormously powerful, and when you allow yourself to give in to it you become more relaxed and your relationship with the world becomes more open and less confrontational, so that you end up feeling, quite naturally, at the centre of the world. The title is therefore not a boast but a description of a state of mind, and the chorus turns it around: it is the other person who is the centre of the world, the first flare fired into the sky when the singer loses his bearings, the one who takes his time, his space and the best of him.