Buonaguidi - Setola

Authors: Luca Buonaguidi – Salvatore Setola

Title: Ambulance Songs. Don't Forget the Songs That Saved Your Life

Publisher: Arcana

Pages: 252

Price: 17.50 euros

If you love music, then you surely have a little corner at the bottom of your heart where the most important songs of your life are jealously kept. And I'm sure that, among these, some stand out so forcefully that they can be called "the songs that saved your life" — those songs, in other words, that kept you company during hard times or that helped make the happy ones even brighter.

It's the saving power of music. A power well described in the pages of Nick Hornby's "31 Songs" or in those of "My Tunes" by Maurizio Blatto, two books not by chance cited as sources of inspiration by the two authors of this book, emblematically titled "Ambulance Songs" — as if to say that there are songs which, when you need them, when you feel your life is falling apart, when you realize you're at the end of your rope, arrive sirens blaring to comfort you, offering you a soundscape in which to find solace. Because, to put it in Marcel Proust's words, songs serve to preserve the memory of the past and, we would add, they offer that framework of sounds, harmonies and words capable of evoking that "lost time" which, all things considered, is merely submerged and waiting to resurface.

"Ambulance Songs" sets out to give space, as Luca Buonaiuti and Salvatore Setola explain in the introduction, to a "widespread emotion, an eroticism of music that sets aside the hostilities of interpretation in favor of a poetic feeling toward songs." Built like a true compilation (complete with a tracklist, opening track, ghost-track and so on) and divided between poetic texts and prose pieces, the book shifts the center of gravity of music discussion from the album to its founding core, the song, relying on writing that gives itself entirely over to the free, forceful flow of passion. A passion that, even when it has to reckon with the historical, social and cultural background in which a given song blossomed, still manages to transfigure it into an emotional landscape, drawing the reader into an adventure that the two authors have no intention of confining to the pages of this book. Buonaguidi and Setola, in fact, have set up the blog www.ambulancesongs.com, where they invite anyone who wishes to share their own emotions and memories tied to the songs that saved their lives. The book also comes with extra content curated by guests Diego Bertelli, Carlo Bordone and Claudio Fabretti.

So, what are you waiting for? Read this fine book in one sitting, and then go and tell us about your own "ambulance songs" too!

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01/01/2026