Tommaso Paradiso between love and Lazio: "The Ariston excites me more than the Olimpico"

At the Sanremo Festival we met him in a place that seems to have come out of one of his songs: “The romantic club”. It is the emotional headquarters that Thomas Paradise wanted a cozy and visionary space in the heart of the Ligurian city, covered with flowers made with Lego on the walls. An idea that perfectly describes his imagination: pop and poetry, lightness and depth, nostalgia and bright colours. A temporary refuge during the most frenetic week of Italian music, but also a declaration of intent.

Sitting among those plastic flowers that seem real, Paradiso reflects on the meaning of romance, a word that is often abused but which for him has a thousand declinations. Among these, also football. When we ask him if the Ariston stage could excite him more than the idea of ​​a stadium like the Olimpico, he has no doubts: “You know that based on how I am, I really think so, because I come from a path made up of stages, live performances, but not television stages and therefore in my opinion this is something that could generate a very different emotion in me”. It is the difference between the collective ritual of the concert and the exposed intimacy of television, between the roar and the silence that precedes a note.

Football, however, remains a visceral passion. Avowed fan of SS Laziodoes not shy away from provocations about the ranking and the moment of the Romans. When it is pointed out to him that AS Roma is third, he replies jokingly: “You are better off.” Then he becomes serious again and addresses the issue of the Biancocelesti’s ownership: “Unfortunately, we cannot decide. This is something that I often say to my friends, to all of these elderly people that it is something that does not depend on us, because if he says that he says I am the owner of Lazio, if I am the owner of Lazio, that’s fine. The club is scalable and the club is one for sale, you have to put up with it and what can we do? It’s this, we put up with it, we accept our bitter fate. Is it OK?”.

Another central element of his poetics immediately emerges in his story: the female universe. “I have always been surrounded by only women in my life, let’s be honest,” he confesses with a smile. And then he explains how this constant presence has shaped his sensitivity: “it led me in some way to live in a world of women and I continue to live it because in any case I was born, that is, I lived only in the family, there was only a mother in my first close family. My mother has five sisters, they almost all gave birth to girls, that is, in the sense that I also had another one and therefore then in some way in life the woman has always been a point of reference, both in real life and as a reference of inspiration as a woman angel, in some way also in the verses, In the end, banal poetry has always inspired me in songs.” Today that trail continues: “now there is another person in my life to love and this fills me with life, this fills me with life, that is, it is pure oxygen”.

In the “Romantics Club” we don’t just talk about music. Paradiso lights up when he mentions One Piece, a passion he doesn’t hide and actually displays with pride. On the glove that he also showed off on the inaugural Eni Carpet, a sticker with Rubber Straw Hat stands out, the smiling face of Monkey D. Luffy with his inseparable hat, symbol of freedom and adventure. “I wish all people, all the people on earth that before they die they should read One Piece because it is the greatest work that has ever been conceived by a truly human being,” he says without hesitation. And he reiterates: “but I’m also talking about, we’re at the levels of the Divine Comedy and beyond, this Japanese man has been writing this stuff here since ’98 and we haven’t finished everything yet. It’s an incredible work that fundamentally talks about liberation, that is, freedom from the oppressor”. For him it is a story of friendship and resistance, “the most powerful work I have ever read in my life”. He specifies this with a hint of irony: “I have a very banal degree in philosophy, so I have read something, that is, understood it, but this thing really destroys you, disintegrates you”.