Vicky Cornell: “I told Chris to do something with Ramazzotti”

Chris Cornell and Eros Ramazzotti together for a duet. On one side a grunge icon, on the other one of the ambassadors of Italian music abroad, who started “from the outskirts where the trams don’t go any more” to conquer the entire world. The operation never materialized, but it was a long-time dream of Chris Cornell’s wife, Vicky.

In an interview given to the Roman edition of the daily newspaper La Repubblica a few days after the robbery she suffered in the center of Rome (she was on Via del Corso shortly after lunchtime when two men approached her, punched her and robbed her of a precious gold watch studded with diamonds) and on the day her husband would have turned 60, the widow of the Seattle rocker, who died in 2017, said:.

I’m still shocked, my bones hurt. I look around. But many friends who are in Rome and I haven’t seen them for a long time have written to me. The first was Eros. Eros Ramazzotti. He sent me a message asking if I was in Rome. I was still under police surveillance so I was surprised that the news had spread so quickly. Eros is a very nice person. When I was young we took care of promoting his shows in Paris. He is a great singer. I have been following him since the duets with Tina Turner. I always told Chris that he should do something with Ramazzotti.

Vicky Cornell then talked about her husband Chris’s habits when the couple lived in Rome with their children:

In October 2010, Chris and I came to Rome to record the song with Gabin, Lies. While we were going to the airport in Paris, it was raining and cold. When we arrived in Rome, it was sunny. It seemed like paradise. Here, everything was wow. Chris started saying: what are we still doing in Paris? It’s dark, it’s always raining. They hate children, they prefer dogs. He said this because many times when you go to a restaurant with children, you get rejected in Paris. We should find something here, Chris said. Then I saw this house near Piazza del Popolo and we took it. We fixed up the apartment, it took eight months. We went back and forth to Los Angeles. But Chris loved Rome. Every now and then he would walk down the street and people would recognize him. They would approach him and ask: are you really Chris Cornell? We settled here in 2015. We enrolled our two children in school. We also brought the dogs. Every morning he would wake up and go for a run in Villa Borghese or in the streets around here. He spent the afternoon with his children after school. Especially when they were younger. It was “Bimbo time”. He picked them up from school, then took them to Villa Borghese and they took their bikes. We often stayed home. When you travel a lot, like Chris did, you need to stay home. After dinner he took his guitar and sang with the children. There was a guitar in every room.

And speaking about the artistic legacy of the former Soundgarden singer, Vicky said:

My husband was not just a singer or a musician. He invented grunge. He was an incredible man. For me he was the greatest poet of this time.