Contrabbando directly translates to "smuggling" or "contraband". It's a word that immediately evokes a sense of illicit activity, secrecy, and danger, making it quite intriguing.
In the song, it's used to describe a relationship that operates outside conventional norms, perhaps with a sense of rebellion or a hidden, intense connection. The phrase "Giochiamo con il fuoco sottobanco" (We play with fire under the table) further emphasizes this idea of a clandestine and risky bond, making "contrabbando" a central and captivating theme.
"Contrabbando" treats a love story as smuggling. TROPICO, Cesare Cremonini and Fabri Fibra sing about a bond that has to be kept off the books, played out sottobanco, under the counter, because everything around it feels compromised. The opening verse piles up references, Neruda and a Best Western and George Best walking out of Manchester, to sketch a romance that is equal parts magic realism and panic.
Underneath the wordplay it is a song about wanting out. The chorus keeps returning to the same escape, forse in un posto che sembrava un altro, maybe somewhere that looked like a different place, and to the mud the two of them are climbing out of side by side. What they find is not freedom but contraband, something borrowed and not quite legal that still feels like flying.
Fabri Fibra's verse widens the lens onto Italy itself: Sanremo and Amadeus, Bocelli handed over to America, the mafia and the Church, trap and drill, nuclear bombs on the map. It is a country where everything becomes news and nothing actually shifts, so the only honest thing left is the refrain, come stai, come sto, how are you, how am I, asked flatly by two people who already know the answer.