Nuova Compagnia Di Canto Popolare
La Serpe A Carolina

Moving through the alleys and squares, between the smell of the sea and the stench of the fishermen's load that permeates the air. Weaving through the people crowding the city, some shopping, some flaunting their nobility, and others surviving in the most disparate ways: it is the art of making do.
In the Naples of the Bourbons, despite the harsh life, it was not uncommon to encounter amateur musicians spreading their music. Notes rich with irony, pathos, or simply bursts of musical adrenaline.

Three hundred years pass, and a group of Neapolitan musicians form the Nuova Compagnia di Campo Popolare with the aim of reviving those verses and stanzas that echoed centuries before. Thus begin the ethnomusicological studies and research in order to recover the testimonies of the Bourbon period.

"La Serpe a Carolina" is the third album produced by the NCCP (after "Cicerenella" and "Lo Guarracino"). It is realized by Eugenio Bennato, Giovanni Mauriello, Peppe Barra, Fausta Vetere, Nunzio Areni, and Patrizio Trampetti, under the artistic direction of master Roberto De Simone. All are excellent musical talents, also endowed with great theatricality in their gestures (a fundamental quality in live performances). The instruments are those of folk tradition: guitars, flutes, violins, the "putipù", and the "triccheballacche". The result is a magnetic and electrifying album, where one breathes the various faces of 18th-century Naples.

Among the typical elements of Naples' daily life is religious superstition, present in the tracks "Madonna tu mi fai" and "De la cruel morte de Cristo", set to the rhythm of sacred music with popular influences.
"Il Mattacino" is a moresca, and according to popular standards, this type of song was performed to ward off disasters like plagues. The group's vocal work is phenomenal in all the songs, the various voices contrast with each other and at the same time form a uniform choir. It ranges from the proud voice of Peppe Barra to the nasal and distinctive voice of Giovanni Mauriello, with the presence of the gentle throats of Trampetti, Bennato, and Vetere.

The NCCP also recounts moments of daily life, like the duel between singers in "Canta a 'ffigliola"; paints the typical old, meddlesome, and intriguing woman of the "bassi" with the villanella "O Vecchia"; there are also livelier tracks with "Ballo di Sfessania" (following the typical rhythm of the tarantella) and "La 'Ndrezzata, an Ischian song; inside it, there is also an interlude recited loudly by Peppe Barra. There is even room for political satire, in the calm title track. "La Serpe a Carolina" is an explicit rebuke to the misgovernment of the Queen of Bourbon and her numerous lovers.
The album closes with an instrumental track, the Neapolitan classic: the "Tarantella del '600". A song performed with impeccable technique at the right speed. The dance of the tarantolati is compelling, beautiful to listen to, evoking times gone by, a different Naples and at the same time always the same.

The NCCP represents for the whole world the highest expression of Neapolitan musical art. A musical form that absolutely must be reevaluated and spread in the Italian and global artistic scene, to ward off the increasingly rampant invasion of neomelodic vulgarity.