His death was ruled to be the result of suicide, but even decades later, a plethora of evidence in favor of murder was cause to reopen the investigation twice.
It has been rumored that Luigi Tenco was the product of an extramarital relationship between his mother and an unidentified man of the Micca family, for whom she worked at the time: potentially the sixteen-year-old son or his father.
[1] Tenco spent his childhood in Cassine and Ricaldone until 1948, when he moved to Liguria, first to Nervi and then to Genoa, where his mother had a wine shop called Enos in the quarter of La Foce.
[1] Tenco made his debut in the world of Italian professional music with the band I Cavalieri (The Knights), which included Giampiero Reverberi and Enzo Jannacci amongst others.
He also collaborated on the soundtrack of the film, and introduced his friend Fabrizio De André (unknown at the time) through the song La ballata dell'eroe (Ballad for a hero).
In September 1964, he released "Ho capito che ti amo", a song written by him with musical arrangement by Ezio Leoni.
[5] In Argentina, "Ho capito che ti amo" was the soundtrack of the popular soap opera El amor tiene cara de mujer.
The military service did not stop him from traveling to Argentina together with Gianfranco Reverberi to meet the fans of El amor tiene cara de mujer.
[13] Several people close to Tenco witnessed that he was more upset with the corruption and bribery at the festival and planned to hold a press conference to unveil it all.
[15][16] In 2004, on TV program Domenica in, commissario Arrigo Molinari, the detective who led the case, when asked by host Paolo Bonolis, stated that he was sure that Tenco did not commit suicide and defined his death as "a collective murder".
[11] In 1967, no autopsy was performed on the singer's corpse, and no paraffin test or calligraphic analysis on the suicide note with which he explained his final gesture were done.
[11] Notably, the alleged farewell note does not appear in the police report, as it was not found in room 219 on the night of Tenco's death.
I'm doing this not because I'm tired of life (I'm not) but as a gesture of dissent against the public who chose 'Io, tu e le rose' for the final night and against the commission that selected 'La rivoluzione'.
Game, in particular, would seem compatible with Tenco's intention to denounce clandestine betting, as he had announced to his fiancée Valeria in the above-mentioned telephone call.
According to Italian experts, what had been thought to be the entry hole on Tenco's left temple was actually the exit site.
[6] At the time of Tenco's death, a door to the inner garden was located only three meters from room 2019, the same one used by police used to transport the body.
They interviewed the undertaker from the case who stated that commissario Molinari had ordered the body to be immediately transferred to the morgue and before the arrival of the forensic team; it was then taken back to the Savoy and reassembled to allow the photos to be taken and attached to the above-mentioned file.
[11] Music producer and friend Paolo Dossena stated that he drove Tenco's car from Rome, where the songwriter lived, to Sanremo.
He later confronted the songwriter, who confessed that he had a gun because someone in the past few weeks had tried to force him off a steep road near Santa Margherita Ligure while he was driving.
In one of these letters, Tenco writes that his relationship with Dalida was nothing but a clumsy attempt to forget Valeria, who, months before, had left him.
[6] To date, besides the official conclusion of suicide, journalists have come up with three theories: Shortly after Tenco's death, his friend and songwriter Fabrizio De André wrote the song Preghiera in gennaio (A prayer in January) for him, in which he describes a benevolent God welcoming those who committed suicide into Heaven in spite of the moral condemnation of the bigots.
Francesco De Gregori's album Bufalo Bill of 1976 contained a song, "Festival", about Tenco's suicide; it points out the hypocrisy with which the music establishment tried to minimize the dramatic event, to let the show go on.
French journalist and novelist Philippe Brunel wrote a fiction book, La nuit de San Remo ("The night of Sanremo"), in which he dramatises the arduous search for truth about Tenco's death.