Franco Battiato

Franco Battiato – Fisiognomica (1988)

The features of the face reveal the traits of character. A young Franco, still with a perfect nose, before the football accident, eyes framed by heavy eyelids, a crew cut, a deadly serious jacket and tie, the faint smirk of someone who, in life, will see things from a long way off.

The star map is the same one from “La Voce del Padrone”, the child-Battiato on the cover and the tint of the background recall “On the Strings of Aries”. And this album is, at heart, a union of the former's pop-orchestral flourishes with the latter's electro-intimism. On “Aries”, Franco returned to his childhood, showing himself sitting on a low wall watching the sea, the same sea that would later open “Summer on a solitary beach” and that now laps at the edges of an album steeped in the scent of coastlines swept by warm wind, of orange blossom and lemons from Sicily. Fisiognomica marks a return to his native land, and it's the album that most reminds me of where I too come from. Veni l'atunnu, scura chhiù presto, Sunday family gatherings, the dialect, tales of village life, the smell of traditional sweets, stories of ancestors floating on the waves of time. Between East and West.

“E ti vengo a cercare”, with its sublime way of speaking about love in the sense of everything that is love, means that each of us can claim as our own that perché ho bisogno della tua presenza as a message addressed to anything one might love: a person, one's homeland, God... The seed of a beautiful ambiguity that will blossom fully in “La cura”.

In the background, electronics once again, as in his younger years, building a bridge between heart and machine. Then we fly east: “Zai saman”, an Iraqi chant that opens with the austerity of a religious mantra before shifting tempo, speeding up, slowing down and circling back on itself, while Franco, in a trance, predicts the future that is now today; Vuoto di senso crolla l'occidente, soffocherà per ingordigia e assurda sete di potere. E dall'oriente orde di fanatici.

On Fisiognomica, Battiato lays himself bare in recounting his choice to live in his own company. The diptych “Secondo imbrunire”-“Il mito dell'amore” overflows with languor. The desire for union and the desire for freedom collide, Vieni a casa, ti presento ai miei. Fleeing traditional values only to find yourself longing for them. E il cuore quando si fa sera muore d'amore, forced to drift between the inner and outer reaches of feeling, craving solitude and, at the same time, a warm shelter, because non ci vuole credere che è bello stare soli.

“Nomadi” teaches the noble art of escape, and it's as precious as one of Juri Camisasca's beautiful icons, a latter-day Andrei Rublev. A shame about the ugly guitar solo — the fine grain of these compositions deserves clear breezes rather than clusters of notes swirling in the wind. Better to close with a fragment of Bach, as if in a dream. Early in the morning, as the sunlight stretched out to warm the earth cracked by cold, we would look out from one of those low walls of lava stone to scan the horizon. There was a premonition: what I was feeling, or rather, what I was about to feel, I discovered all at once; it revealed itself to me the way revealed truths do. Perché mi piace ciò che pensi e che dici, perché in te vedo le mie radici.

When the electronic pulses fall silent and the vinyl reaches its final rotations, Franco lets you lie back and passes a hand over your forehead. Be quiet, close your eyes, stop thinking. Il dolore, il fermarsi della vita/ lasciano apparire il tempo troppo lungo. “L'oceano di silenzio”, one of the album's absolute peaks, with Beeklam, the dweller of the underground cave where his statues are kept. A soprano's voice and the orchestra's light caress. Peace. E mi pare quasi che un oscuro ricordo/ mi dica che ho vissuto in tempi lontani/ o là in alto, o nell'acqua.

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04/02/2026