34 years ago I gave my first concert in Rome. It was in a club that no longer exists, it was called “Il Castello”. Just over a hundred people were present. Even though it was not a presentation to the press and there was no article to write, Ernesto was also among those hundred souls.
Then, if I remember correctly, he wrote the piece anyway, but that's not the point: the point is that he was just there because…yeah. Because music was such a passion that even if he hadn't been a music journalist, he would have found a way to live it every day and at every possible opportunity.
Fortunately, however, he was a full-time music journalist. And everyone who knew him knows it with a smile.
Because among tens of thousands of albums listened to, I don't know how many concerts were seen and reviewed, requests for pieces and favors, the desk covered first with vinyl, then with cassettes, then with CDs and now the computer full of audio files, Ernesto, there in the Middle, he always had the ball. With the needle of his compass, moved by his taste, by his inexhaustible curiosity and even more by the joy of being in the music, touching it, trying to hold on to it, moving as far as possible possible to get involved with it and feel it in yourself and talk about it and discuss it and fall in love with what I know, the Lemonheads or Sufjan Stevens or a thousand others. The smile, I said, from someone who perhaps never fully understood – because it's too good to be true – being able to turn their passion into a career. Of those who have seen so many that they are ready to dismantle with the first Roman “Aho” anyone who tried to spout some nonsense. An “Aho” however, always expressed equally through the kindness and elegance of this smile. The smile, always that one, from someone who never had to seem conceited because he knew he knew. And he knew that lightness was a form of respect for both light and heavy music.
I will really miss all our musical discussions, but even more the smiles that accompanied them.
He will be missed by everyone else who loves music and knows he has lost someone who can guide him with the discretion of a suggestion.
And she knew how to do it, because she loved music unconditionally to the core.