An essay that accompanies us, with competence and acumen, in the discovery of an unpublished and still little-known Franco Battiato, in whom we find, however, all those traits of creativity, foresight and genius that we have come to love in his songs.

«Franco Battiato has traversed many different places along the span of his more than 40-year musical journey. However, within this broad path, the output from late 1974 through 1978 remains too little known to this day. During the last twenty years I have repeatedly solicited Battiato himself and some of the musicians who had participated in the making of these albums, so that I could find something written down, but to no avail: no one remembered what happened to the original materials. In 2021, the discovery of some scores shed a different light on Battiato's authorial development, as he abandoned his beloved synthesizer – with which he made his first solo records – to fully explore the sonic universe of acoustic instruments: the piano, voice and violin. This book takes a detailed look at the experimental output of a composer who has always refused to use his talent in a predictable way, eschewing the expectations of both critics and the public. Even when success had come to him, he always offered those who followed him choices that went against the grain. No one ever knew what to expect from him, and this was undoubtedly one of his strengths». (From the Introduction)

«Carlo Boccadoro’s book is an invaluable tool, an excursus through Battiato’s records furthest from pop. As a musician and musicologist, Boccadoro performs the miracle of taking us by the hand inside the music and inside the mystery of those recordings, analyzing piece by piece, contextualizing historically, and speaking several languages at once: a more technical one (and musician readers will be happy about that) and a more universal one, making the journey through the ‘74-’78 production a path of falling in love accessible to all.» Francesco Bianconi, Corriere della Sera

«A submerged Battiato, bold, ironic, mystical, difficult... This unearthing work is due to Carlo Boccadoro, a composer and essayist with a penchant for an anti-academic contemporary music, open to the most diverse solicitations, an enemy of ideological alignments. And Battiato, in 1970s Italy, was a pioneer of this, and also among the most voracious. Five albums produced from 1974 to11978. Five revealing records. Boccadoro restudies them with a philologist’s flair: he found in many cases the scores that had been lost, all reconstructed from various sources. But not only that: he analyzes them closely, reading the composer’s intentions on paper and noting the differences from the records. Above all, he contextualizes them in the historical climate of the 1970s: a climate that was effervescent in the international scene of contemporary cultured music, but – according to the author – less exciting in Italy.» Andrea Estero, L’Essenziale