Beppe Carletti at 80: the man who turnet a lifetime on the road into an Italian legend

There are musicians who spend their lives chasing the next big thing, and there are musicians who, almost without realizing it, become part of a country’s collective memory.
And Beppe Carletti belongs firmly to the second category.

On this day, August 12, 2026, the founder and keyboard player of the Nomadi turns 80 and, sixty-three years after the band was born, he is still doing what he has always done: getting into a car or a van, travelling to another town, stepping onto a stage and playing for people who, in many cases, have been listening to the Nomadi for longer than they can remember.

“Playing almost every night in a different place isn’t a job, it’s my life,” he has said. “If we weren’t always moving, what kind of Nomadi would we be?”

It is a sentence that could almost serve as the band’s manifesto.

The Nomadi were born in 1963, when Carletti and a group of young musicians from Emilia-Romagna began building a musical adventure that would outlive fashions, record-industry revolutions, political seasons and even several generations of performers.
And, more than six decades later, they remain one of the longest-running bands in Italian music history and even the second-longest-running band in the world after the Rolling Stones.
But numbers only tell part of the story.
The real measure of the Nomadi’s extraordinary longevity can be found in the roads they have travelled, the towns they have returned to year after year, the audiences who have grown older alongside them and the songs that have continued to acquire new meanings with time.

And at the centre of that story, almost quietly, has always been Beppe Carletti.
He has never particularly looked like a rock star, nor has he behaved like one, and his relationship with success has always been remarkably uncomplicated.
He did not set out to become famous, he says; he simply wanted to have fun and make a living doing something he loved, and perhaps that is precisely why he lasted.
While the music industry repeatedly reinvented itself, Carletti remained attached to something much more difficult to manufacture: authenticity.
For him, a concert was never merely a performance.
It was an encounter.
The Nomadi’s audience did not simply buy records or tickets, as they shared a language, a collection of values and, above all, a sense of belonging.
That relationship has become one of the defining features of the band’s history.

But there is also another name inseparable from Carletti’s story: Augusto Daolio.
The charismatic singer and songwriter became the voice and spiritual heart of the Nomadi, and although he died in 1992 at just 45, his presence has never really left the band.
In Carletti’s office, portraits and drawings of Daolio remain prominently displayed, together with every gift from a fan, which is carefully preserved. Memory, in the Nomadi universe, is not something to be archived and forgotten, but something to be carried forward.

Carletti now dreams of telling that story on screen.
At 80, one of the things still sitting in his “drawer of dreams” is a television drama or film about his life and, above all, about his extraordinary encounter with Daolio.
It would be more than a conventional music biopic, as their story would also be the story of an Italy that has changed enormously since the 1960s: the Italy of small towns, youth culture, political idealism, social commitment and music that travelled from one generation to another without losing its emotional force.

And there is another dream, perhaps smaller but symbolically powerful: returning to the Sanremo Festival.
The Nomadi have already lived through virtually every chapter of modern Italian popular music.
A return to Sanremo, Carletti suggests, would be a beautiful way to celebrate the band’s record-breaking longevity.
Not because he needs another trophy, but because the festival itself has become part of the country’s cultural DNA.
That distinction matters.
Carletti has never seemed interested in collecting achievements simply for the sake of collecting them, and his career has been built almost in spite of ambition.
The extraordinary has emerged from the ordinary: one concert after another, one road after another, one handshake after another.
And some of those handshakes have been extraordinary indeed.
Over the decades, music opened doors that the young musician from Emilia-Romagna could hardly have imagined, meeting figures such as Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Yasser Arafat and Federico Fellini. He found himself face to face with heads of state, religious leaders, artists and people whose names had shaped history.

“I, a small man, had the opportunity to shake hands with very important people,” he reflected. “Music opens doors and speaks to people’s souls.”

Yet the importance of those encounters was never simply about proximity to power or fame.
Carletti’s career repeatedly moved in the opposite direction: towards ordinary people and communities in need.
For him, music and social commitment have always travelled together.
In 2012, after a devastating earthquake struck Emilia-Romagna, he conceived and promoted the Concerto per l’Emilia. Around 40,000 people attended, and the generosity of the audience helped raise almost €1.2 million for the reconstruction of hospital departments in Carpi and Mirandola, in a remarkable demonstration of what a concert can become when the stage is transformed into a place of solidarity.
Carletti also took part in missions in some of the world’s most fragile areas and supported numerous social causes. His commitment earned him the Artisti per la Pace award and the Medaglia d’oro di Cavaliere dell’Infanzia, while in 2005 President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed him a Knight of the Republic.
Then, in 2023, another symbolic chapter was added to the story: President Sergio Mattarella received the Nomadi at the Quirinale to celebrate the band’s 60th anniversary.
Sixty years.
And for a band, that number is almost surreal.
For Carletti, however, it is just another milestone on the road.

The Nomadi’s music has always carried a particular kind of Italian melancholy: songs about friendship, war, love, injustice, death, hope and the search for meaning. Their repertoire includes works written for them by some of the country’s most important songwriters, above all Francesco Guccini, whose words became deeply intertwined with the band’s identity.
Songs such as “Auschwitz”, “Dio è morto” and “Canzone per un’amica” are not simply pieces of a back catalogue, but cultural landmarks, songs that have survived because the questions inside them never became obsolete.
Today, the Nomadi still begin their concerts with “Noi non ci saremo”, one of Guccini’s compositions written for the band. At the end of the song, an image of Guccini appears on the screen.
It is a simple gesture, but an incredibly powerful one.
Because the Nomadi have always understood that their history belongs not only to the people currently standing on stage, but also to everyone who helped build it.

Carletti has recently had to confront the loss of two people he admired deeply: Don Antonio Mazzi and Francesco Guccini himself.
Their absence has added another layer of reflection to a birthday that might otherwise be only a celebration.
But even grief becomes part of the journey.

“Music makes you age well,” Carletti says. “I believe it is the best medicine.”

Perhaps that is the secret.
At 80, he is not looking back from a distance, but he is still inside the story.
The Nomadi continue to tour.
The audience continues to arrive, the songs continue to be sung, Augusto Daolio’s image continues to appear, Guccini’s words continue to resonate, the names of those who are gone continue to be remembered.
And Carletti continues to move, carrying with him the faces of musicians who shared the stage with him, the memories of friends who are no longer here, the drawings left by fans, the stories collected along thousands of kilometres of Italian roads and the unmistakable conviction that the past is not something that prevents a story from continuing.

“What we are today is the result of all the artists who have been part of the Nomadi,” he says. “They all contributed to this story. Some of them are no longer here, but that spirit continues.”

And that may be the most fitting definition of Beppe Carletti’s legacy.
Not merely the number of years.
Not the records.
Not the awards, the famous handshakes or the stages.
But the continuity.
A young musician picked up his instrument more than six decades ago and decided to keep moving. Along the way, he helped create one of the most enduring stories in Italian music, lost friends, found new generations of listeners, turned concerts into acts of solidarity and transformed a band into something much larger than its individual members.
At 80, he still has dreams in the drawer.
A film about Augusto. A story about the Nomadi. Perhaps another journey to Sanremo.
And, inevitably, another road.
Because if there is one thing Beppe Carletti has spent a lifetime proving, it is that some journeys do not really have a final destination.
They simply keep going.