This article about Eros Ramazzotti was published on November 29, 2007, in issue 47 of vanity fair
Opening the door to Eros Ramazzotti’s spacious, orderly and very bourgeois Milanese apartment, on the top floor of a beautiful downtown building, enters his personal manager Bruno Bugiani, who has followed him since 2001. With a shaved head and a Franciscan beard. Bruno is 45 years old and has the imperturbable air of someone who has seen the world (for sixteen years he did the same job that Gianni and Donatella Versace did).
It’s three in the afternoon and music can be heard from Eros’s small studio, the last room on the right. With a bassist friend, Flavio, Ramazzotti has fun with the guitar, “bass” a recorded drum base, improvising in the key of blues and jazz. Tasty music even for those poisonous critics who have always told him that when he sings “bala.”
In recent years, due to interviews, we have seen each other often. Eros draws attention to the memory of him: he remembers exactly what we said to each other a long time ago. And to think that he meets hundreds of journalists everywhere. We sat on the couch in a small lounge near the music room and had coffee. I ask him how the “war” with bacon is going, and he stands up and lifts his shirt: “Here it is, it’s always here. There’s nothing to do.” Then he sits down and begins: ‘A Sca’, please don’t describe me like some of your peers. I am not sad or afflicted nor am I a victim of who knows what bad luck. I am calm and collected. This story must end.”
The end of the marriage to Michelle Hunziker, the gossip and everything else: is this what you mean?
“Yes. After all, what happened to us happens to many other people every day.”
But you two are not like “other people.”
«We are public figures, I know, but at a certain point we have to stop. “I can understand some curiosity, but the continuous siege, every day, is really too much.”
Weren’t you also the ones who fueled the public’s interest?
«Yes, but unintentionally. I have always preferred to let my music speak, I have never needed anything more to end up in the newspapers. However, to change things up, I decided that from the next album I will start with the lyrics of my songs. I want them to be more mature, less tied to my life. I realized that I am too instinctive and never fully evaluate the effects of what I sing. And I end up getting angry when they tell me what I’m not like.”
The last opportunity?
«There are always those who, when they talk about me, veer towards the morbid. To make him look like a suffering person, they even posted photos in which I look older and uglier.”
It has aged a bit.
«Sure, but not that much. And then, is it possible that even the national tigi, with all the serious things happening in the world, will interview me to find out if I am back with Michelle?”
By the way, will you get back together?
“No. Are you going to do it too?”
After so many years, I should have shielded these things.
“Let’s wait. I’m a sensitive person and I still can’t let everything slip away. Certain mechanisms can overwhelm. Look at Britney Spears: are we really sure that she is as toxic, alcoholic and crazy as she seems? Experience tells me that the The truth is almost never what it seems. For example, no one believes me when I say that I have never used cocaine.”
