Sanremo, it's time for tractors at the Ariston

Sanremo – It's raining in Sanremo, it rained all day, but Rai in the end avoided the most insidious lightning. Come on, the Viale Mazzini line won: no protesters on stage, just Amadeus reading their statement. It seemed like an impossible compromise, it was forced down the throat of the hardline fringe of the autonomists. Who only got satisfaction late, after midnight, when Amadeus read a brief summary of their document signed “national coordination agricultural redemption”. He read, on their behalf: «We ask for a clear law that guarantees the fair distribution of value along the agri-food chain, with mutual benefits for producers and consumers. We are not in the streets asking for help or subsidies but only the right remuneration for the hard work we do every day. Work thanks to which we all eat. This does not happen, the fruit of our work is largely underpaid, with costs above the sales value, unbearable. We protest for this. Without agriculture there is no life, no freedom, no food sovereignty. We only ask to be able to carry on the love and respect that our parents and grandparents passed on to us for the land. With the sole aim of leaving a better world for our children…”. At the end Amadeus comments: «We are close to the farmers» and with these words closes the reading of the extract of the speech on the Ariston stage.

The afternoon

The tractor protest risks sounding louder than the duets of the protagonist singers of the fourth evening of the Festival, edition number 74. Shortly after 6pm, the farmers' statement which has been talked about since the beginning of the singing event was sent to Rai. That is, since Amadeus declared that he was ready to open the doors of the Ariston and offer the stage to some representatives of the protest but Rai explained that it did not have an interlocutor sufficiently representative of the fragmented galaxy of farmers who have been agitating for days. In the end a mediation was found, as with Zelensky's message last year, with the formula of the statement to be read on stage. But even getting to the document (and the reading confirmation) was neither simple nor short.

The note was sent to Rai by Agricultural redemption coordination but with the sharing of other autonomous collectives. And, also for the signature, there was a long discussion in the afternoon because the souls of the agricultural world as we know are multiple and it was not easy to identify a single one that represented them all. Ornella Muti also arrived on the tractors in the morning. As announced for days, the actress also joined the protest Ornella Muti and daughter Naike Revelli who posed for photographers under the water on one of the tractors together with their Calabrian farmer friend Antonio Zangari. The actress and her daughter arrived from Piedmont (they by car though) after having joined the protest days ago and they attack very harshly (especially Naike) the organization of the festival and Rai for having opened the doors of the Ariston without but let a representative of the protest come on stage. Meanwhile, it continues to rain in Sanremo and around fifteen tractors arriving from Piedmont at lunchtime were detained by the police from the Bussana flower market.