Peppe Vessicchio, portrait of the Sanremo director who became a pop icon

His legend, probably, was born at Sanremo 1996 when Elio, frontman of Elio e le Storie Tese, surprise runners-up with La Terra dei Cachi, the eponymous song of the country in which we live, from the Ariston stage apostrophises him as "Maestro Peppuzziniellicchio Vessicchiuccetticci". It is there that Peppe Vessicchio, great music professional, overcomes the dimension of simple conductor and becomes something else: all-round pop icon, meme before memes existed, rare shared national heritage of a country that, since the times of Guelphs and Ghibellines, whenever it can, divides itself on everything.

He died at the age of 69, on a November afternoon at the San Camillo Hospital in Rome, where he was hospitalised for a bad bout of pneumonia, the Maestro of Sanremo par excellence, an asset not too material for the Rai perhaps more important than the Horse of Viale Mazzini. Had it not been for the fact that he had ended up with RAI over copyright issues related to Margherita, the hit song of La prova del cuoco, again because we are the country of Guelphs and Ghibellines. And that cause had won, because there is a judge in Berlin but sometimes also in Rome.

Before television, Vessicchio had in any case been many things, outside but almost always within music. Born in Naples in 1956, brought up in the working-class neighbourhood of Bagnoli, the Italsider district, he had been part of the Trettré comedy group before the 1980s, the replacement with Gino Cogliandro and the success at Drive In. Because Peppe, a graduate of the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella, felt like a musician and wanted to make music above all in life.

And so he found himself collaborating with artists of the calibre of Edoardo Bennato, Peppino di Capri and Gino Paoli. With the latter, in particular, he signed hits such as Ti lascio una canzone and Cosa farò da grande. Since the 1990s he has been inextricably linked to the Sanremo Festival, where he became a regular presence and won four times: in 2000 with Avion Travel (Sentimento), in 2003 with Alexia (Per dire di no), in 2010 with Valerio Scanu (Per tutte le volte che) and in 2011 with Roberto Vecchioni (Chiamami ancora amore). Then the relationship with Rai broke down due to the lawsuit that the Maestro had to undertake to have the rights to Margherita recognised, and his presence at Sanremo began to rarefy.

But it is the television audience that wants him at the Ariston and, since we are in the age of social media, it is all a blossoming of memes in which Vessicchio is warmly invited to direct our lives, with Peppe also becoming the only character who can confirm or overturn your score at the Fantasanremo. The list of collaborations (from Andrea Bocelli to Zucchero, from Ornella Vanoni to Ron and Biagio Antonacci) is as long as that of his passions beyond music. Two above all: football and wine. Growing up a few steps away from what would become the Maradona Stadium, he was a great Napoli fan, as well as having founded the Musikè winery, where Montepulciano and Trebbiano d'Abruzzo are produced and aged with... musical harmony. Plus a few cameos as an actor, playing himself and more, in The Jackal's TV series Pesci piccoli.