Franco Battiato
Il Vuoto

THE REVIEW

When I was little and I hadn't yet formed clear ideas about the guiding thread I should follow, it happened occasionally that my parents would take me to mass. Especially my mother. Partly to try to instill in me an education fairly faithful to primary religious canons, and partly because, living in a small town, it was tradition and good taste to go to church at least once a week. On Sunday. I remember how an overwhelming and heavy desire to sleep would gradually build up inside me and despite my efforts to find something to do or think about, a stimulus that could wake up my senses for a moment, I spent those forty minutes in a state of catalepsy from which I wouldn't recover at least until three, three thirty in the afternoon when I finally went out with my playmates. Blurred images passed before me, the paintings and stained glass windows of the church seemed to come to life and enter through that now small slit that my eyelids left available to my eyes. The apex would come when the priest started the sermon. At that point or shortly after, I seem to remember that people would kneel. And to me it was normal; in fact, I thought some would even lie down, utterly exhausted from that experience. Well.

Dear readers, I have tried to make you understand fairly well what I felt, but if you want to experience it firsthand, you don't need to go to mass; buy this Battiato album and listen to it.