Francesco De Masi
L'Italia vista dal cielo

This album, released in 1970, gathers some of the soundtracks from the early 14 documentaries titled L'Italia vista dal Cielo, shot by Folco Quilici between 1967 and 1978 and produced by RAI.

The series was very successful and even today, some reruns are shown on RAI Storia Channel (in addition to the usual videos on YouTube). It's worth watching; it's one of those beautiful documentary craftsmanship works that we Italians were so good at crafting without having to copy the dull clichés from across the ocean, a practice so dear to present times.

The music is composed by Francesco De Masi, a Roman composer mainly specialized in the spaghetti western genre (Sartana non perdona, above all). In this album, De Masi does an excellent job with the soundtrack. It's a pity to listen to these beautiful tracks without the support of the images. I think of a piece like Nebbie sulla palude, a melancholic romance that truly evokes the thickness of the mist.
But this melancholy is only an exception. The rest of the work is divided between very light Latin jazz (Altalena party), silent film music (Dumbo), or simply for vintage commercials (Little bar), the folk of roasted chestnuts and red wine of Accanto al caminetto, the insidious unfolding of La grotta del mistero.

In short, there is something for everyone's taste, especially for those with a passion for antiquities and trinkets of the (glorious?) past.