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Saronno, boredom and a borrowed number

Andrea Meazza was born in 2002 in Saronno, a town in the province of Varese on the commuter rail line into Milan. He grew up largely with his grandparents while his mother worked as an office employee in the city, a job that cost her around six hours a day in travel. Money was short and one parent was absent; the steady presence was his grandmother, Miria, whose particular talent, as he describes it, was declining to judge anyone who came through the family's life, including the people who had done it damage.

He found rap at thirteen, during a summer spent in Diano Marina on the Ligurian coast. The 22 in his stage name is borrowed from Cranio Randagio, the Roman rapper who died at twenty-one; Meazza has said plainly that he took the name because the death hit him hard.

He surfaced in 2021 with a run of singles — among them Amore 1, Meriti, Extraurbane, Mama and Per i Roiz — and the EP Falene. The method was set early: beats built off acoustic guitar figures, and a delivery closer to a shout than a flow, voice scraped raw. Features followed with Niky Savage on Spoiler and Spoiler 2, Big P on Million Dollar and Silent Bob on 20 anni. He credits the dead hours on benches in a provincial town, and the boredom that came with them, as the thing that made him write at all; he now calls the relationship with Saronno a pleasant one, and a creative engine rather than a trap.

Breakthrough, then the charts

The first project with a major behind it was the EP Isolamento di gruppo, out on 31 May 2024. Around it, Amazon Music picked him as one of three artists for its Breakthrough programme for 2024, which meant playlist placement, in-app visibility and commissioned video and audio content — the kind of institutional push that moves an artist from regional interest to national release schedules.

The single Speranza arrived in April 2025, trailing the debut album V per ventidue, released on 9 May 2025 through Warner Music Italy. It entered the FIMI album chart at number 36 and then refused to leave, logging 36 weeks on the chart and eventually taking a gold certification in 2026 — a slow-burn trajectory rather than a launch week.

The EP La cura followed on 3 October 2025 and performed considerably better on arrival, debuting at number five. A deluxe repack, La cura, in nome di Miria, came on 23 January 2026, carrying his grandmother's name into a title for the first time. La cura went gold in week six of 2026 and crossed into platinum — more than 50,000 units under FIMI's thresholds — in week 41 of 2026. The collaboration Fanculo, with Marracash, is also certified gold. Somewhere in this stretch he moved from Warner to Island Records.

Miria: eighteen tracks in three acts

Miria arrived on 18 September 2026 via Island Records and Universal Music Italy, and entered the FIMI album chart at number one, topping the album, CD, vinyl and cassette rankings in the same week. It runs to eighteen tracks split into three named acts — Arricchiti, Miria and Provinciali — each with its own sleeve image, moving from gold chains and material excess, through a figure dwarfed by a tree of life, to a man armed and dug in, accepting where he is from. The tree of life on the packaging is the record's governing symbol and a direct nod to the provinces.

The singles mapped the structure: Arricchiti with Guè, then 2 passi dal cielo non uno in più, then Provinciali on 11 September 2026. Guests across the album include Tedua, Paky, Promessa, Sayf and 18k. Miria herself died close to two years before the record came out. Meazza has said he writes these things for himself first — lines he wishes he could still say to her — and that the album is partly a measurement of how much of her he actually absorbed.

He is careful about what Arricchiti is claiming. The point, by his account, is trajectory rather than inventory: not an assertion of wealth but a record of having started with none and made some. He bought his grandfather's old house, which closes a loop in which a family went from debt to owning property inside a single generation.

Reviews were warm about the ambition and sceptical about the execution. Writing for Rapteratura, Valerio Bellabarba called it an album with a thousand very good intentions and praised the nerve of attempting a long, structured record at all, but judged it too chaotic to function as a concept album, noted that the references to Miria are far too few to make her a character rather than a symbol, and argued the production sometimes sands down the scratched scream that is his whole signature. He singled out Ti darò as the second act's peak and Victory Lap, with 18k, as the moment of fullest self-acceptance. La Casa del Rap took a similar line on the content — not a new set of subjects, but handled without posturing and clear of fake-gangsta cliché.

Where he stands now

Miria was certified gold on 12 October 2026, inside three weeks of release, in the same FIMI batch that pushed La cura to platinum; the album was still sitting at number two that week. On 10 October 2026 his label and promoter confirmed that every date of the Miria Live Tour had sold out, five weeks before the first show.

He has been drawn into the wider argument about his own generation without much appetite for it. After the unrest in Milan in October 2026, which involved large numbers of teenagers and ended in arrests, he declined to take a side in partisan terms, writing that he would always stand with people who work honestly but that lacing a just cause with hatred only strengthens the common enemy. His own diagnosis is structural rather than local: schooling that does not prepare anyone, work that is hard to get into, costs that have outrun wages. He has also said he would like to compete at the Festival di Sanremo sooner or later, though no entry has been confirmed.

What the room looks like

The live template was set on 10 May 2026 at Fabrique in Milan, a sold-out show with standard tickets at €31 and a VIP package at €55, billed under the Ventidue è speranza name. The stage was dressed as a large grassy meadow, and the La cura material was rearranged for a full band rather than played over backing tracks. Niky Savage, Silent Bob and Diss Gacha came out as guests. The night closed with a holographic projection of a tree growing from its roots until it bloomed, which was how the existence of Miria was announced. Atlantico in Rome, immediately after, also sold out.

The meadow has carried over to the autumn run, along with the blooming-tree imagery — a staging choice built around the album's contrast between hardness and fragility rather than around pyro or screens. Nothing about an opening act has been published for any of the seven dates, and no official setlist has been released.