Flavio Giurato

A singer-songwriter of highly distinctive inspiration and (sadly) scant commercial success, Flavio Giurato was born in Rome in 1951, the son of a diplomat and younger brother of journalist Luca. He made his musical debut in 1978 with a concept album, "Per futili motivi", produced by Michelangelo Romano. Across the thirteen tracks that make up the record, Giurato tells the story of a young man who, coming of age, lives through fascism and the events of the Second World War. In an almost documentary tone, the album touches on bombings and raw emotion, but also love and chance encounters. The record, for which it's hard to pin down any clear point of reference, is as unusual as it is bold.

After a few years of silence he returned to the scene with an album that presented itself in a new dimension, backed by video support. "Il tuffatore" – the title of both the album and the single – was among the most frequently aired videos on Mister Fantasy, the show hosted by Carlo Massarini.

His next release recounts the emotions and feelings of the fantastic adventure of “Marco Polo“, which is also the album's title. The uniqueness of "Marco Polo", its unrepeatable nature, or the commercial indifference it had to face, shouldn't be traced back to the author's use of an overly complex, hermetic, impenetrable form. This isn't a work chasing the depiction of a universe so personal that it ends up coinciding with the sphere of his own individuality. Or at least, not only that. Giurato instead takes the path of grand narrative. He chooses to recount the deeds of Marco Polo. The author thus becomes an extradiegetic narrator of the story, meaning he recounts events from outside the narrative itself. But in architecting the discourse and its evolution, in giving the story his own deeply personal tension, Giurato sets in motion what is effectively the driving force of the whole record: the dialectic of opposites. He doesn't just sing about Marco Polo, he ends up being acted upon by him. He doesn't merely narrate the deeds of the Venetian traveler but blends into them, in a play of mirrored reflections where one gets lost in the other and the other resurfaces in the first. And Marco Polo, in being sung about, ends up absorbing all the pain and humanity of a narrator who, in telling of a journey, embarks on it himself.

Despite a recording silence that lasted throughout the 1990s, Flavio Giurato kept writing songs and occasionally performing live, purely for the love of it. In 2001 he released a new album, Il manuale del cantautore, featuring five new songs recorded between 1990 and 1996.