Music, stories and songs for Rocco Scotellaro
a project of
Ambrogio Sparagna
with the Italian Popular Orchestra of the Auditorium Parco della Musica
the Popular Choir directed by Anna Rita Colaianni
and the extraordinary participation of Peppe Servillo

Passaggio alla Città (Passage to the City) is the title of a performance that Ambrogio Sparagna composed on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the poet-mayor of Tricarico, one of the most significant figures of 20th-century southern culture. At the center is Rocco Scotellaro's poetic production at once simple and unusual, sweet and aggressive and endowed with a special musicality. In particular, Sparagna chose some of Scotellaro's most famous poems--such as "The Garden of the Poor," "Violets are of Barefoot Boys," "Passage to the City," "We Will Not Get Wet," "They Stole You from Us Like an Ear," "Lucania," and "Always New is the Dawn"--writing the music according to forms and sounds typical of the Lucanian oral tradition. The realization of the musical score is entrusted to the typical agro-pastoral instruments of Lucania such as bagpipes, ciaramelle, bark and reed flutes, accordions, tambourines, friction drums (cupa cupa) and the typical "viggianese" harpicella, masterfully played by the soloists of the Italian Popular Orchestra. The show is also enriched by a series of short stories about the condition of rural social life in the 1950s taken from Scotellaro's best-known publications such as "L'Uva puttanella" and "Contadini del Sud," interpreted with great narrative intensity by Peppe Servillo.