Borsa Valori

Song Meaning

These lyrics present a chillingly detached stock market listing from Milan, but the commodities on offer are far from typical. What begins with mundane items like a worker's sandwich and suitcases quickly devolves into a disturbing catalog where human suffering, disease, and even mental degradation are assigned a monetary value. The tone is cold, clinical, and profoundly unsettling, as if life's most tragic elements are just line items in a ledger. The central tension arises from the brutal juxtaposition of luxury and profound human misery. A "Villa extralusso" is offered with options like a swimming pool, but also with "silicosi," "mutilazione da fresa," or "sicura e rapida evoluzione schizoide." This grotesque bundling of opulence with severe illness and mental decline, each with its own price tag, forces the reader to confront a world where everything, even the most intimate forms of suffering, can be quantified and traded. The craft here is in the relentless, almost bureaucratic listing format. The repeated use of "Modello" (model) for everything from a sandwich to an airplane to a specific illness strips away any sense of individual humanity, reducing all experiences to standardized products. This clinical language, combined with the stark financial figures in Lire, creates a powerful sense of dehumanization, suggesting a system that has utterly lost its moral bearings. Ultimately, these lyrics are effective because they make us question the true cost of progress and the value placed on human life in an increasingly commodified world. The closing lines, warning that "L'operazione viene effettuata dall'alto" and an "ostaggio verrà rilasciato lo stesso," add a layer of systemic, almost indifferent power, implying that these transactions of suffering are part of a larger, inescapable design. It's a stark, unsettling vision that lingers long after the final price is read.