As a man of letters, fine taste and musical notation, Robert Cellini is a name you might recognise – with good reason. For five years until November 2010, he wrote half this newspaper. Furthermore, he was also an acclaimed musician – a lead singer with unbridled energy and furious enthusiasm.
A valued colleague, he filled our office with his infectious passion for the beauty of life for five years, and we sorely missed him when he left. Now, following his death of cancer at the age of 50, we will miss him forever.
The impression he left on us and the world was clear at his funeral at Præstebro Kirke in Herlev last Saturday, where a full house including six of his former Copenhagen Post colleagues gathered to bid him farewell.
Bachelor visits Bologna
Illinois-born Robert, like so many before him, moved to Copenhagen out of love. He met his wife Hanne in Bologna in 2000 and didn’t take much persuading to end his bachelor days at the age of 36.
As a musician, labour mediator and director of a foreign trade office, he had already lived a varied life, but his initial years in Denmark were no cakewalk. He later recalled them as “the hardest” he had experienced.
For many years, he drove a taxi, memorably dropping off Mads Mikkelsen at the airport “disguised in dreadlocks and a Rastafarian shawl”.
A love of Copenhagen
Robert grew to love this city, and with Hanne and his son Marco found immense happiness.
Interviewed for the newspaper back in 2007, Robert conceded that the “job can be very stressful and our staff are overworked and underpaid”, but that it had helped him “finally feel more at home in Denmark”.
Robert found joy in many things: sport, travel, reading, good wine and food, craft beers, friendship and performing on stage. As the lead singer of Canadian outfit Gone Hazel and then Danish ska group Yardshaker, he was clearly in his element.
Final piece of the jigsaw
But until Copenhagen, a piece of the jigsaw didn’t quite click. As his uncle’s eulogy explained, he had lived his life as a lost soul, never fully inhabiting his surroundings.
“I finally found my place,” Robert whispered to him on his deathbed.
