This release features songs from Southern Italy as well as solo guitar music performed by singer Letizia Fiorenza and guitarist David Sautter. Fiorenza and Sautter formed the group I Cantimbanchi after meeting while they were both on scholarship at the Swiss Institute in Rome researching the subject of folk songs of Southern Italy.Letizia Fiorenza, who spent her childhood in southern Italy, selects songs and then frees them from any constraints of sentimentality. What remains is a diversity of texts that are not in any way limited to describing the carefree cheerfulness of the south. Instead, room is made for biting satirical wit, sadness, melancholy and easily aroused anger. In racing, crackjaw “parlando”, a speech-like form of singing, and with a strong, unaffected voice, she tells stories of the people living between Rome and Sicily. David Sautter uses the songs that Letizia Fiorenza has chosen as the takeoff point for his own musical adaptations. He absorbs the archaic and immortal elements in the music and joins them together with his own experience and background, the background of a classically trained musician who spent his childhood in the northern latitudes.
