Carlo Buti
Bella Ragazza

Carlo Buti.

The nightingale. The Italian song, the arias, the lightness, a gramophone, our great-great-grandparents there before it, listening by the fireplace to the fabulous trills, when music was still like that, nothing complicated, but just a beautiful voice accompanied by a few instruments telling the story of "Reginella campagnola" or "first love" "fiorin fiorello" if not even "Faccetta nera".

Every now and then I would like to be there (se stava mejo quanno se stava peggio?), in front of that fireplace listening to this great singer (in the purest sense of the word), to intone an aria that does not make me think that I am under a harsh, heavy regime, and that I have to sweat too much for that piece of bread, and so on, the more rhetoric there is, the better, because it fits perfectly here.  

Now all of this is no longer. (Was it ever there?) 

Unfortunately, I must acknowledge that even the feelings of purity I so long for are a utopia, and they never even existed, and I am losing myself in the vast sea of nostalgia, and there's no more treacherous nostalgia than that which refers you back to something that never existed. And yet, listening to Carlo Buti allows me to dream a little, at least, which has never cost anything and at least this is not the privilege of the great and the powerful (perhaps it's even denied to them) and at least for a moment take flight.