The first time I visited Genoa in northwest Italy, I got lost in its web of medieval lanes, or vicoli. When I finally emerged onto a small square near the old port, a group of elderly men burst into a cappella song, turning the heads of startled shoppers.

As I continued my walk, I came across the street Via del Campo, which contained a plaque to a man called Fabrizio De André, with the lines ‘dai diamanti non nasce niente/dal letame nascono I fior’ (‘nothing grows from diamonds/but flowers grow from dirt’). It reminded me of a line from ‘Seeds Will Grow’ by Ms Dynamite – ‘black roses grow from concrete’.

In Italy, Genoa is to singer-songwriters as Bristol is to trip hop. Most popular among the generation of 1960s and 1970s artists known as the scuola genovese stands De André, often described as Italy’s answer to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. De André wrote with a unique sense of political urgency, decrying hypocrisy, discrimination, and oppression wherever he saw it. The subjects of his songs are taken from the vicoli of Genoa, the downtrodden fishing villages of Sardinia, and ostracised Romani communities across Italy. Additionally, like Dylan, his lyrics were viewed as poetry in themselves, which, in some Genoese schools at least, forms part of the curriculum.

De André was born in Genoa in 1940 to a prosperous family. In his early childhood, the family moved out of Genoa to the hills of Piedmont so that his factory-owner turned anti-fascist Partisan father could escape pursuit by the police. The sense of belonging to a moral struggle was surely formative for the young Fabrizio. As a musician he came to prominence in the mid ’60s and released his first album, Volume 1, in 1967.

It contained ‘Via del Campo’, a song about a sex worker on the eponymous street and featuring the lines from the memorial plaque found there. Other popular tracks included ‘Preghiera in Gennaio’ (‘Prayer in January’), which criticises the Catholic Church’s condemnation of those who commit suicide, with the memorable final line: ‘Hell only exists for those who are afraid of it.’ It also features one of his most famous songs, ‘Bocca di Rosa’, which tells how a sexually liberated woman upsets the social order of the small towns through which she passes. Whether in religion or social mores, De André’s disdain for hierarchy was clear early on.

De André’s work became more overtly political in the 1970s, culminating in Storia di un Impiegato (Story of an Administrative Worker), a concept album that follows a worker who rebels after hearing a song from the May 1968 protest movement. The story ends in his eventual imprisonment and subsequent realisation that collective struggle is the only solution to the country’s problems.

De André’s passion for telling stories of the working class and the downtrodden was only strengthened when he and his partner were kidnapped in 1979 by Sardinian criminals. The two had recently moved to the island to work on a homestead they had purchased. The crime took place during a period of widespread political violence in Italy known as the ‘Years of Lead’, and a year after the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, one of the country’s most prominent politicians from the Christian Democracy party. The historian John Foot notes that, unlike other victims of similar kidnappings, De André had the audacity to sympathise with his captors, claiming that they were the real victims—driven as they were by deprivation—and he later put this to music in the song ‘Hotel Supramonte’.

After his kidnapping, De André would celebrate Italy’s regional diversity by singing in different dialects. This was also a way of giving voices to those whose ways of life were dying amid Italy’s rapid modernisation after World War II. ‘Crêuza de mä’ (‘The Muletrack to the Sea’) used the Genoese dialect to create an ode to the city’s mariners and fishermen, while the 1991 album Le Nuvole (The Clouds) contained a song in Gallurese—a northern Sardinian dialect—and mocked Camorra boss Raffaelo Cutolo in ‘Don Raffaè’, sung in the Neapolitan dialect.

During the tour of Le Nuvole, De André told an audience that he would not be among those celebrating the upcoming festival for the 500^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus (another Genoese) reaching the Americas, citing as his reasons the extermination and expropriation of native peoples. In light of the cultural consequences of his voyage, the singer says, Columbus ‘discovered fuck all’.

Like many singer-songwriters of his generation, De André was profoundly influenced by the anarchist idealism and struggle for freedom that lay behind the 1968 movement. His love for the people was matched, unfortunately, by the two less fruitful loves of alcohol and chain-smoking, which brought about his death in 1999. His funeral was attended by 10,000 people.

In 2009, ten years after his death, a TV documentary on De André attracted a surprise eight million views in Italy, an appeal which was attributed by many to the Berlusconi government’s anti-Roma policies and its perceived indifference to anti-gay hostility in the Vatican. De André’s widow, Dori Ghezzi, claimed at the time that affection for him was growing rather than waning.

As anti-immigration politics still enjoy a powerful hold over Italy, the man and the music will remain as urgent as ever. To call De André one of Italy’s most important cultural icons would constitute hero worship of the kind that the man himself, in all his modesty, would have rejected. Then again, it would also be true.