By Katya Marletta
Abu Dhabi: This evening, the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi brings Rosa Balistreri’s story to the screen with L’amore che ho (The Sicilian Storyteller), Paolo Licata’s film inspired by the life of the Sicilian singer. The screening is presented by the Italian Cultural Institute in Abu Dhabi, directed by Professor Susanna Iacona Salafia, and forms part of Italy’s cultural programme in the United Arab Emirates, promoted by the Institute together with the Embassy of Italy in Abu Dhabi, led by Ambassador Lorenzo Fanara, through cinema, art and language. But L’amore che ho is more than the story of a singer. It is the portrait of a woman who turned her voice into an act of freedom. Some voices do more than sing: they carry a place within them, with its wounds and its pride. Rosa Balistreri was one of those voices. She turned a difficult life into music, and that music into a harsh, popular and necessary truth.
The Sicily shown in the film is not the postcard island of tourist-light, easy beauty. Balistreri’s Sicily is harder: a place of pride, poverty, anger, faith, family ties and oppressive rules. It was also a world in which many women were expected to endure in silence, to carry the pain of others and leave their own unnamed. Balistreri refused that silence. She gave it a voice.
Born in Licata, in the province of Agrigento, in 1927, she grew up amid deprivation and humiliation. That early harshness never left her singing. She did not learn music in conservatoires, but in the streets, in homes, in fields and in ordinary life. Her school was the environment around her: prayers, curses, work, fear, gossip and silence. Even when she became one of the great voices of Sicilian popular music, that origin could be heard throughout every note. Her sound was not polished. It was urgent.
Balistreri did not sing to please. She sang because a feeling inside her had to come out. Her speech could be rough, almost broken, and then, suddenly, tender. It carried anger, but also pity. It carried pain, but not surrender. Listening to her, one hears not only an individual story but also the memories of many women who suffered, waited, resisted, and stood.
L’amore che ho tells her life as a trek through memory rather than a conventional biography. It moves through childhood, forced marriage, violence, escape, motherhood, the discovery of art, public recognition and the difficult balance between private life and vocation. At its centre lies a question that still appears urgent: what does it mean for a woman born on the margins to become the voice of others? And what does it cost to refuse silence?
The title is simple, but it holds weight. L’amore che ho does not speak of love received or promised, but of the love kept within despite everything. For Balistreri, love was never a safe refuge. It could mean need, anger, loyalty, protection, or contradiction. It was love for Sicily and rage towards Sicily; love for the poor and a refusal to make poverty picturesque; love for song and the awareness that singing cannot save a life, though it can give that life meaning.
To tell Rosa Balistreri’s story today is not to indulge in nostalgia. It is about women, violence, class, memory, and dignity. Her art was born of oral tradition, but she was never trapped by it. She took that tradition and made it personal, political, and modern. She understood that popular music is not a lesser form: it is an archive of lives often excluded from official history.
In her songs, Sicily is not simply a landscape. It is an ethical world: the island of labourers, mothers, prisoners, emigrants and rebels. It is the language of those who found little space in books, yet continued to exist through voice. That is why Balistreri still matters. Every age has its silenced people, its invisible women, its convenient forms of forgetting.
Her life was distinguished by deep fractures: forced marriage, domestic violence, poverty, prison, separation, motherhood and exile from a destiny chosen by others. Yet what might have remained only a story of suffering became an artistic path. After leaving Sicily and entering the worlds of theatre, music and intellectual debate, her sound was recognised not only as the private cry of a wounded woman, but also as a public force.
Success did not make her harmless. She remained intense, difficult, passionate and committed. She sang injustice with the instinct of someone who had known it long before she could explain it. She sang for workers, for abused women, for those living in poverty and shame. Her art was inseparable from her ethics. She did not use the people as material: she belonged to them.
Her speech held together tenderness and accusation, prayer and rebellion, lullaby and blade. It seemed as if Sicily were speaking through her, without hiding its contradictions. She could console, but never cheaply. She could wound, but never gratuitously. Her truth rested in the fact that life had not spared her.
That is why she escapes labels. She cannot be reduced to “folk singer”, “victim”, “rebel”, “mother”, “icon” or “legend”. She was all of these things, and much more: a woman defined by the violence of her time, but not defeated by it; an artist who held the memory of those without archives; a Sicilian who loved her land enough to denounce its cruelty.