It was supposed to be the summer of returning to the Italian stages, and instead it will be a summer of rest. Claudio Baglioni has announced the postponement of the upcoming “GrandTour Life is now“, the tour that was supposed to debut on Monday 29 June in Piazza San Marco in Venice. The reason is an acute interstitial pneumonia that hit the Roman singer-songwriter, with a prognosis of ninety days of rest and treatment.
What happened
The artist himself explained it in a video message posted on his Instagram profile. Baglioni says he initially thought it was a simple flu, “one of those that are a little out of season”, caught around his seventy-fifth birthday, on May 16th. Only it didn’t go away. Hence the decision to investigate further with some tests, and the discovery that much more was hidden behind those symptoms: not a simple flu but acute interstitial pneumonia, an inflammation that the singer-songwriter himself defines as rare and of a certain importance. After a drug-based therapy, the most delicate phase is now behind us, however the issue of recovery remains, because it is one thing to heal, and another to be able to keep up with the rhythm of a concert again.
What is acute interstitial pneumonia
It is worth stopping for a moment on this diagnosis, because it is not just any pneumonia. Interstitial pneumonia is a serious form of infectious pneumonia that affects the lungs in the deepest area, the interstitium, i.e. the tissue that lines the alveoli. The acute variant, also called Hamman-Rich syndromefalls into the idiopathic forms, those without a known cause, and is a rare pathology that can be triggered by viruses, bacteria, fungi and exposure to dust.
Symptoms
The signs are often not immediate and the most frequent symptoms are dyspnea (the so-called hunger for air, accompanied by a feeling of weight on the chest), dry cough, fever and general exhaustion. A symptomatology common to many other respiratory diseases, and therefore often underestimated.
Treatment
On the treatment front, a lot depends on the severity of the individual case. In forms such as Hamman-Rich Syndrome, cortisone is used effectively, while more serious conditions may require ventilatory support. Once the acute phase has passed, the patient can recover full lung function and return to normal life in a not too long time, even if a condition of fragility remains which will see the patient forced to a period of rest, in which he will have to be kept well protected from new infections, because there is a risk of recurrence.
The words
In the video Baglioni starts from a verse of Man of various ages (“I retained my eyes and my lungs“) to explain how important those organs are in his profession. The eyes to capture suggestions and glances, the lungs as a “real machine, the bellows” that allows you to sing. “Once the apparatus has been fixed, its functionality must be recovered,” he said, because to sing a rather demanding repertoire for three hours almost every evening you need to be in top condition.
Hence the choice, which he himself defines as painful and difficult, namely to move the entire tour, which would have started on June 29th from Venice and ended in September in Turin. It will be postponed by exactly one year, from 2026 to 2027.
We leave you with the video in question:
View this post on Instagram
