Patrizia Laquidara

Catania, then the Vicenza foothills

Laquidara was born in Catania on 29 October 1972 and was still young when the family moved to a small town in the province of Vicenza. She studied music there and spent weekends playing piano bars. The two geographies never resolved into one, and most of her work since has been built out of the distance between them — Sicilian material surfacing in a Veneto accent, and the other way round.

Her years busking in Spain she treats as the real apprenticeship. Speaking to AltoVicentinOnline on 19 May 2026 she called music "a form of barter and exchange" and described a concert as something made with the people in front of her rather than delivered at them — a position that explains a great deal about how she stages shows now. In 1998 she attended the CET school in Lombardy, run by Mogol, Lucio Battisti's lyricist. Her first solo album, Para você querido Caé, was dedicated to Caetano Veloso, and the Brazilian thread has never left the records.

The prizes, and the turn away from the obvious

The early recognition came quickly. She took the Musicultura prize at Recanati in 2002, and in 2003 went to the Sanremo festival with "Lividi e fiori", winning both the Mia Martini critics' prize and the Alex Baroni prize for best interpretation. Indirizzo portoghese followed. Her most widely heard piece from that period is probably "Noite e luar", written with Paolo Buonvino for the 2005 film Manuale d'amore.

Instead of consolidating, she moved sideways. Funambola was produced by Arto Lindsay with Patrick Dillett. The Bologna Conservatory gave her its Gold Mask prize for popular music singing in 2007, and the Giovanni Paisiello prize followed in 2009. Then came Il canto dell'Anguana, sung largely in dialect and drawing on the water-spirit folklore of the Veneto pre-Alps; it won the Targa Tenco in 2011 in the dialect category, alongside the Trofeo Insound for best singer the same year. Around that work sit collaborations with Ian Anderson, Carlos Núñez and Rita Marcotulli, research with the historian Emilio Franzina into the songs of Italian emigration, the band Hotel Rif, and touring that has reached the United States, Brazil, Japan and Ecuador.

She is clear-eyed about the cost. "I lost part of my audience, another part arrived," she told AltoVicentinOnline, in the same conversation in which she said she no longer believes society can be changed by art, only individual people.

A novel first, then the record

The pivot of the last few years was not musical. Her debut novel, Ti ho vista ieri, was published by Neri Pozza and reconstructs a childhood with magical and uncertain edges; it collected literary prizes and set the terms for everything that followed. The book came first, and the songs were quarried out of it afterwards.

In parallel she became a stage performer in someone else's work. She has appeared with Marco Paolini in Boomers and Mar de Molada, and is on tour with him now in Bestiario Idrico, written by Paolini with Giulio Boccaletti, directed by Fratelli Dalla Via, with dramaturgy by Marta Dalla Via, Diego Dalla Via and Michela Signori, music by Giuseppina Casarin, and sets and lighting by Michele Mescalchin. Jolefilm produces with the Teatro Stabile del Veneto. The piece walks through Italy's hydraulic landscape — rivers, dams, canals, land reclamation — and argues that the governance of water has shaped not only the terrain but the communities, economies and social relations sitting on it. Laquidara is billed with Paolini as a performer, not as accompaniment.

Flòrula, in two chapters

Flòrula arrived on 6 February 2026 on Lunanordesina, produced with Edoardo Piccolo. It is her seventh album and the first in eight years, issued on CD, in a limited double vinyl edition and as a five-track digital EP. Rather than release it whole, she split it: a second chapter landed on 29 May 2026 and widened the cast of characters.

The title is botanical — the set of plant species occupying a given territory. Her own gloss is that it became "a metaphor of a human and emotional ecosystem made of minute and resistant presences". The opening track, "Nessuno deve restare di fuori (Ti ho vista ieri)", sung with Giulia Mei, grew out of the novel and out of a trip to the peripheries of Recife, and turns into something closer to a collective anthem. Elsewhere there are "Anna la ciaccaligna", "La bambina", "Cunizza (Assabenerica)", "Nuova luce", "La ragazza della 127", and "Ti saluto con la mano", on which the rapper El Coco — her nephew — takes the spoken part. Antonio Vargas of Delicatoni also features.

The sound is the most processed of her career without being cold: Piccolo's synthesizers and rhythm programming under Sicilian instruments played by Puccio Castrogiovanni, Brazilian percussion from Clécio Santos and Fernando Silva, Daniele Santimone's guitars, Stefano Dallaporta's bass, strings and female choirs. Writing in Rock Nation, Luca Cremonesi read it as the work of an artist keeping Italian songwriting alive without retreating into commercial anonymity, singling out the opening track and the tradition-and-electronics collision of "Cunizza".

Her interviews around the second chapter kept returning to language. "Le parole hanno un peso enorme" — words carry an enormous weight — she told Recensiamo Musica on 2 June 2026, arguing that sound often carries more than literal sense. To Sky TG24 on 5 June 2026 she said she would like "ti amo" replaced by "ti vedo": I see you, rather than I love you.

Where she is in October 2026

Most nights this autumn she is in a theatre under someone else's name. Bestiario Idrico played the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara from 9 to 11 October 2026 and Verbania on 17 October, and runs at the Teatro Grassi in Milan from 20 to 25 October. After that the run continues at the Politeama Genovese on 13 November, Pavullo nel Frignano on 17 November, Cattolica on 18 November, the Teatro Rossini in Lugo on 19 November, the Teatro delle Celebrazioni in Bologna from 20 to 22 November, the Teatro Colosseo in Turin on 26 and 27 November, Grado on 3 and 4 December, Premariacco on 5 December and the Teatro Sociale in Como on 6 December.

Her own dates are deliberately scarce. One Flòrula "concerto condiviso" is currently on sale: Monday 2 November 2026 at 8.30pm in the Sale Apollinee of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, promoted by ZEN Production with the theatre, with tickets through Ticketmaster. A second follows at the Teatro di Pergine in Trentino on 9 December in the Relazioni Sonore series. On 15 November she takes part in the 25th Reggio Film Festival at Cavriago, in conversation with Laura Gramuglia and playing with Edoardo Piccolo.

What the reviews say

The Flòrula run began with the album's live debut in Ferrara on 6 February 2026 and a second night the following evening at Revolution in Colceresa, near Vicenza, with Chiara Patronella opening. Heraldo's reviewer came away describing an evening that had slipped the usual concert shape, music turning into narrative.

Rome, on 17 March 2026 at Monk, was the clearest statement of the format: no stage at all, a table in the middle of the room, chairs arranged in a circle around the players. Sixteen songs in the main set and three encores, with Piccolo on keyboards and programming, Santimone on guitars and Dallaporta on bass. The setlist threaded Flòrula material through older songs — "Uirapuru", "Rosa rosa", "Nordestereofonico", "La sulfarara", "L'equilibrio è un miracolo" — and both opened and closed with "Nessuno deve restare di fuori".

Four nights later, on 21 March 2026, the Folk Club in Turin was full, with the stage within touching distance of the room. Quotidiano Piemontese's reviewer noted Piccolo moving to the drums, laptops and controllers sitting beside guitar and bass, and Laquidara picking up triangle and tamburello as a rhythmic part of the performance rather than decoration. The write-up praised a settled, unhurried stage presence and a voice kept precise and central, with songs running into one another and introductions delivered conversationally.