For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the site of several water mills, used to grind grain that would be distributed to citizens—the bread in the “bread and circuses” of Juvenal’s famous formulation. A minute or two from our apartment is the Acqua Paola, a massive Baroque fountain erected at the beginning of the seventeenth century to glorify Pope Paul V. From there one has a panoramic view of the towers and domes of the old city, and tourists are taken up to admire it in various picturesque vehicles—Vespas and sidecars, vintage Fiat 500s, golf-cart-like contraptions that seat six and look like they could easily tip over.
Every afternoon I meet the school bus at the Porta San Pancrazio, where French troops breached the city walls in 1849, vanquishing the defenders of the short-lived Roman Republic. Memories of the Risorgimento, or unification movement, are everywhere. I go for walks in a park lined by busts of its fallen heroes, a dashing crowd, fond of flamboyant hats and facial hair. Just by the fountain, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s fascist nephew had the soldiers’ bones collected into a mausoleum, unveiled in 1941 in the era’s stark neoclassical style, replete with eagles, wolves, and the ominous motto rome or death.
Rome can feel overburdened by history. My neighborhood is home to numerous Catholic organizations, secluded behind high walls and hedges, and as you walk down the northern slope of the hill on the way to the Vatican, you can almost feel the temporal power—and the accumulation of capital, occasionally manifesting itself in the form of a black Mercedes carrying some functionary on his way to do business at the Holy See.
When I’m staying anywhere for more than a few days, I tend to find myself in a record store, preferably the kind filled with strange old vinyl by artists I’ve never heard of. There’s a sweet spot between overfamiliarity and total bewilderment where I can lose hours marveling at cover images and squinting at liner notes, wondering what unheard sounds could be hidden inside. Like old books, old records are bearers of all sorts of cultural information. Record stores can be portals to the kind of stories that don’t leave traces on the surface but are as important as old stones for understanding a city.
A few weeks ago, I was in a shop in Trastevere, the riverside neighborhood at the foot of the hill, and I found a peculiar-looking folk record. On the cover was a photo of some kind of village festival, with costumed people surrounding a giant effigy of what looked like a rat wearing the kind of tall hat I associate with Pilgrims or Welsh ladies. I found the image sinister, though admittedly that might have been due to overexposure to Seventies folk horror films. Credited to Antonio Infantino ed il Gruppo di Tricarico, the LP was called I Tarantolati. I’d heard the legends about tarantismo, a condition supposedly brought on by a tarantula bite that causes victims to twitch. The cure, in traditional southern Italian communities, is vigorous dancing. The title and the image were enough to persuade me to hand over my money.
I Tarantolati turned out to be a raucous collection of peasant songs, with a raspy male voice chanting over rough hypnotic rhythms. There were hand drums, harmoniums, acoustic guitar, and an undulating drone that I eventually learned was produced by a traditional instrument called the cupa-cupa (a membrane stretched over a sound box with a bamboo cane at the center; the player rubs a wet hand or a damp rag over the stick to set the skin vibrating). Released in 1975, the record seemed to be a product of the countercultural folk revival of the period, rather than some kind of ethnographic field recording.
As someone who loves falling into rabbit holes, I started reading about the life and work of Antonio Infantino, an artist, landscape architect, and lover of the traditional music of his home region of Basilicata, which is located between the heel and toe of the boot at the southern end of the Italian peninsula. His band mixed traditional songs with political material about the problems of the region, which was grindingly poor and losing its young population, who moved north to work in factories. I found pictures of carnival traditions like the one depicted on the cover and idly began to imagine visiting the villages of Tricarico or Potenza to watch bears and wild men cavorting in the streets. I also looked up the label that had released the record, Folkstudio, and was drawn into a different story, one set in the streets of Trastevere.
In 1959, a former professional football player named Harold Bradley Jr. moved to Italy to study art. After three seasons with the Cleveland Browns and one with the Philadelphia Eagles, he’d made a hard left and turned to painting. Soon, he came across a studio space at 58 Via Garibaldi, just down a steep flight of steps from where I’m writing. Like many Black Americans, Bradley found postwar Europe more congenial than the United States. An imposing figure, he quickly realized he could support his art by acting in movies. He had roles in various Italian sword-and-sandal epics; in 1963 he turned up in Cleopatra, shirtless and wearing a pharaonic headdress, serving drinks to Elizabeth Taylor. He began to open up his studio, often inviting visiting American musicians to play. Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan performed in the space, and a generation of young Romans were exposed to American cultural currents, from Beat poetry to the civil-rights movement. Folkstudio’s logo was a pair of stylized figures, one black and one white, clasping hands around the neck of a guitar. In time, Bradley moved back to the United States, handing over the keys to an Italian collaborator, Giancarlo Cesaroni (the two figures in the logo supposedly represent the two men). The studio expanded, changed locations, and for a period in the Seventies and Eighties, released records, including I Tarantolati, part of which was recorded live at the venue.
Once I’d discovered that a generation of musicians had found their voice in this part of Rome, I began to look slightly differently at the crowds of kids who spend evenings sitting on the steps in Trastevere’s Piazza Trilussa, smoking weed and listening to performers strum their guitars. I sought out music made by some of the Italian singers who learned at Folkstudio and became part of the so-called New Italian Songbook, artists like Giovanna Marini, whose political songs have clear echoes of Dylan and Joan Baez. I began to wonder what else I could find out by digging through the Roman crates.
I don’t claim any particular status as a record collector. Generally I follow hardier and more obsessive souls, those more prepared to burrow through strata of mediocrity to find nuggets beneath the surface layer of bygone hits. When it comes to Italian music, there are fans of the progressive rock soundtracks for giallo horror movies, of the synthetic Italo disco of the late Seventies and Eighties, and of sophisticated postwar canzoni, with lyrics by literary writers like Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia. Few collecting cultures are more intense and recondite than the scene around library music or those devoted to stock compositions made for film and television and intended to evoke specific moods. For some reason, in the Sixties and Seventies, many immensely talented Italian musicians were working in this field, and serious collectors pay sums well into four figures for particularly sought-after records.
The most important and inventive library music composer was Piero Umiliani, who operated from a studio in Rome’s Prati neighborhood that was stuffed with all the latest synthesizers and effects machines. He was so prolific that he had to operate under a number of pseudonyms; non-collectors are most likely to have heard his music via The Muppets, who covered his monster 1968 hit “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” which was originally written for the soundtrack of an exploitation film called Sweden: Heaven and Hell.
The period of Umiliani’s greatness was also that of the so-called Years of Lead, when political tensions threatened to topple the fragile Italian Republic, and terrorist violence from both the left and right reduced the country to a febrile state. News and documentary producers needed music to soundtrack segments on the chaos, and Umiliani duly obliged. Original copies of Problemi d’Oggi (Problems of Today) or Mondo Inquieto (Uneasy World) are absurdly expensive, but I’ve found reissues. They’re peculiar documents, with track titles like “Terrorist,” “Subversion,” “Union Activity,” “Under the Heel,” and “Do Not Give Up.” There are driving electronic rhythms that anticipate the techno of later decades, and drums made to sound like automatic gunfire. The events they reflect still reverberate today, when Italy is governed by a prime minister who was a youth activist in one of the neofascist parties that had played an inglorious role in that period.
The Italian Social Movement, or MSI, the party in which the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni started her political career, has roots that go back to Salò, the rump state that tried to keep the flame of fascism alive in the last years of the Second World War. Monteverde, a neighborhood that lies just behind my own, used to be the site of an MSI office, and in the Seventies there were arson attacks and battles in the streets as left-wingers tried to dislodge them. The MSI has left little visible trace on this sleepy upper-middle-class district, unless you count the fading Celtic cross sprayed on one of the walls that I pass en route to the supermarket. Further into Monteverde, I recently walked through a pedestrian tunnel and found a battered plaque commemorating “the worker Claudio Graziosi, police officer, victim of terrorism, fallen in defense of democratic institutions 22-3-1977.” The young police officer was on a bus when he recognized a fellow passenger as a wanted member of a far-left terrorist group. The woman, Maria Pia Vianale, had recently escaped from prison. Graziosi ordered the bus driver to go to the nearest police station, not realizing that another member of the group was also on board. Antonio Lo Muscio fired a series of shots from a handgun, killing Graziosi, and fled with Vianale. A few months later, the two were recognized by a Carabinieri patrol on the steps of a church near the Colosseum. A firefight started and Lo Muscio was killed. He was twenty seven. It was a minor event, comparatively—in the same years, the president of the major center-right party, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered, and there were bombings that took the lives of hundreds of people.
The politics of the left and right both had their accompanying musical currents, from the stern worker folksingers of the Italian Communist Party to far-right bands inspired by occultism and the organic rural fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien. Meloni herself apparently dressed up as an elf and attended at least one “hobbit camp,” a far-right gathering headlined by a band called Fellowship of the Ring. In a move almost beyond parody, the band has a song about purity and exposing “usury” called “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.” My tastes are broad, but I think some records are best left to gather dust on a shelf.
