Vito Ricci
Music from Memory

Crossing the Rialto bridge of memory, to escape oblivion.

Thus begins The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo by Matthew Maguire, a play set in an impalpable and fictional Venice, where architect Giulio Camillo (1488-1544), builder of symbolic universes, tries to chase his memories and hide from Amnesia, a woman without face and voice.

This play, staged in 1986 in New York, I have never seen. Or perhaps I have forgotten it?

The life of the erudite Giulio Camillo, rooted as it was in the pre-modern idea of a closed and ordered cosmos, was entirely spent in the attempt to shape an unattainable project: an amphitheater able to represent, through symbols, the entire cosmos on its steps; where everything has its place, and where, with a single glance, it is possible to contemplate the universe.

This universal knowledge turned into wood and pigments is memory in three dimensions.

Memory of the entire cosmos through a dense web of symbolic images.

Memory, above all, of Giulio Camillo himself, made of remote labyrinths and bridges reflected in the water mirror of his mind.

Memory that, like a tortuous Wunderkammer, hides within itself this same web of symbols that is a reflection of his endocosmos.

How the plot of this show develops, I wouldn't know to say, nor does the memory of the erudite Camillo concern me, whose eternal oblivion is now given by his own vanity, by his not having realized his enormous project; as well as by the inexorable oblivion of death.

Here is the music, composed by Vito Ricci for this show, which accompanies the journey through the canals of the memory of a man — which is also the memory of the universe— concerning me as a listener.

But what resurfaces from listening to the Music from Memory?

I have forgotten it.

However, I remember that familiar "crossing the bridge," of that life of mine that once was, in a past not yet forgotten, when I lived exactly 520 steps from the last step of the Rialto bridge — how many times have I counted those steps?— and of a Venice that resurfaces from the memory (buried under the triple layer of someone else's memory, imagined by yet another person, and set to music by yet another person) through this mysterious and enchanting music.