"The great thing, both about my journey with Bomba [Dischi] and about Bomba itself, is that I had neither the time nor the opportunity to structure anything. The release was certainly as well thought-out as it was reckless, because you have to picture a 17-year-old kid publishing an EP recorded entirely with iPhone earphones, because we were in quarantine." That is how Arianna Del Giaccio, known as Ariete, describes her debut on the podcast Venticinque. 1997-2022: gli anni che hanno rivoluzionato la musica italiana, produced by Rockit and LifeGate Radio and written by Dario Falcini, Giacomo De Poli and Marco Rip. The episode dedicated to her is the one for 2020 and is available on all streaming platforms from Wednesday 14 February 2024.

2020, the year of Ariete's debut

Born in 2002 in Anzio, in the province of Rome, Ariete began playing, writing and composing as a young child. In 2019, at seventeen, she "stupidly" signed up for auditions at X Factor, where she stopped at the bootcamp stage — so much so that "no one remembers me, because I had thirty seconds on screen and I introduced myself by my real name. Can you imagine: 'I'm going to the Arianna Del Giaccio concert'?", she jokes.

The stage name Ariete, which also happens to be her star sign, came a few months later, when she began sending the same email en masse to every label. "Hi. I know it's probably hard to get a reply, but I'm Arianna, known as Ariete, I'm seventeen years old and I live near Rome and I write and compose all my songs on my own with guitar and piano and I'd like you to hear something."

Listen to "2020: Ariete" on Spreaker.

That's where it all began, because Marco "Drast" De Cesaris (gli Psicologi) and Alberto Paone (the drummer from Calcutta) listened to Quel bar in a van. "For me the most important thing is having an idea — she had an idea," Marco "Drast" would later say. And so Ariete's journey with the Rome-based label Bomba Dischi — the same home as Calcutta and Giorgio Poi — began. Confined to her home (like everyone else) by lockdown restrictions, Ariete spent months recording the songs for her first EP (Spazio, 2020) and doing Instagram live sessions from her bedroom. The desire to play live was stronger than anything else, but the first tour had to wait until 2021. It was thirty dates, all sold out.

Il problema è lo stesso, non sono niente per te,
posso guardarti anche per un anno e non vorresti me.
Tra sette miliardi credi un po' alla casualità
e penso alla fortuna che ho incontrato a vederti in quel bar.

Ariete, Quel bar

"That thing", the 2023 Sanremo Festival

Beyond the — growing — niche of her admirers, the wider public came to know Ariete when, just twenty years old and dressed in an oversized jacket, she took to the stage of the Teatro Ariston to perform at the 2023 Sanremo Festival with the song Mare di guai (which went on to finish fourteenth in the final standings).

When she talks about it at the Rockit and LifeGate microphones, Ariete doesn't even name it at first. She calls it "that thing." And she admits: "It's the thing I was most afraid of." Because it was the first Festival not only for her but also for her label, Bomba Dischi: an experience that forced everyone to step outside their comfort zone and engage with a totally different world — television — doing so at a frantic pace and under a spotlight. "It also brings a lot of wonderful things with it, everything is fantastic, but you realise that life isn't like that," she says. "When you sing you look at the camera, but millions of people are watching you. And people are brutal: people who comment in the street, in newspapers, on Twitter. I want to clash with that world, because I want to get across that even if I don't have stiletto heels, long hair, I'm not all glammed up and I don't have Whitney Houston's powerhouse voice, I can still be a respected and respectable Italian female singer."