Fabrizio De André’s Non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo: 55 Years of Truth, Humanity and Timeless Stories

On November 11, 1971, Fabrizio De André released Non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo (Neither to Money, Nor to Love, Nor to Heaven), his fifth studio album and one of the most distinctive works in the history of Italian songwriting.
More than a collection of songs, it was a deeply thoughtful concept album built around the lives, regrets and revelations of people who could finally speak with complete honesty after death.

The record drew its inspiration from Spoon River Anthology, the celebrated collection of free-verse epitaphs published in 1915 by American poet Edgar Lee Masters.
In Italy, the book had become widely known through Fernanda Pivano’s translation, first published by Einaudi in 1943. De André had discovered it as a young man, when he was around eighteen, and returned to it years later with a renewed sense of fascination.
He was particularly struck by the freedom of Masters’ characters. During their lives, they had been trapped by competition, social conventions, hypocrisy and the need to conceal their true feelings. From beyond the grave, however, they no longer had anything to gain or lose. Their confessions could finally be sincere. In De André’s own interpretation, death became the place where people could say what they had never dared to express while alive.

Working alongside Giuseppe Bentivoglio, who contributed to the lyrics, De André selected nine poems from Masters’ anthology and transformed them into nine songs. The selection was guided by two central themes: envy and science. The first dominates the album’s opening sequence, while the second shapes its latter part, although the songs continually move beyond these categories to explore much broader questions about human existence.

The opening track, La collina, introduces the album’s world through a procession of the dead, establishing the idea that every life—regardless of its social position, ambitions or failures—eventually reaches the same destination. From there, the listener encounters a gallery of unforgettable characters: the misunderstood man in Un matto, the embittered judge in Un giudice, the blasphemer in Un blasfemo and the man whose heart has never experienced love in Un malato di cuore.
These are not simply portraits of individuals. They are reflections on society itself. De André gives dignity and complexity to figures who might otherwise have been dismissed, ridiculed or condemned. The judge, for instance, is not presented as a straightforward symbol of justice, but as a man whose resentment and desire for revenge have shaped his entire existence. The so-called madman becomes a figure of intellectual frustration, while the blasphemer challenges the boundaries between faith, freedom and authority.

The album’s second half turns towards science and its relationship with humanity. Un medico explores the disillusionment of a man who devoted his life to helping others, only to discover the limits of his ideals. Un chimico offers a tragic reflection on love through the eyes of someone who believed that human relationships could be understood through scientific principles. Un ottico, meanwhile, presents a more surreal vision of perception, suggesting that seeing the world differently may be both a form of liberation and a source of alienation.
The closing song, Il suonatore Jones, is particularly significant.
Its protagonist, a musician who chooses freedom over material success and conventional expectations, becomes one of the album’s most memorable figures. His life may not have followed society’s definition of achievement, but he remained faithful to his own nature. In many ways, Jones embodies the spirit of De André’s entire artistic vision: the idea that a meaningful life cannot be measured solely by money, status or recognition.

The musical dimension was equally important.
Nicola Piovani handled the arrangements and orchestral direction, helping De André create a sound that moved beyond traditional singer-songwriter structures. Produced by Roberto Dané and Sergio Bardotti, the album combined acoustic textures, orchestral elements and carefully constructed atmospheres, allowing each character to emerge with a distinct emotional identity.
Yet the real achievement of Non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo lies in the transformation of its literary source. De André and Bentivoglio did not simply translate Masters’ poems into Italian songs. They reshaped them, adapting their language, imagery and meaning to create a work with its own identity. The American small-town cemetery became a universal stage on which the contradictions of humanity could be exposed.
The album’s title itself reflects this perspective, drawing on the opening poem and its rejection of the conventional rewards that often define human ambition. Money, love and heaven—three powerful forces in people’s lives—are placed under scrutiny, not as simple ideals or destinations, but as concepts that can become sources of obsession, disappointment or illusion.

Fifty-five years after its release, the record remains remarkably relevant. Its characters continue to speak about loneliness, prejudice, ambition, failed ideals and the difficulty of being honest with oneself. Their stories remind us that the distance between the living and the dead is not always as great as we imagine—and that the truths we avoid during our lives may be the ones that matter most.
With Non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo, Fabrizio De André created more than a tribute to Edgar Lee Masters. He built a timeless human portrait, one in which the voices of the forgotten become impossible to ignore.