Around the golden age of their first three symphonic masterpieces, the Veneto band built a monumental body of work in constant renewal. From sonic experiments honed abroad to synth-pop flashes of insight, all the way to chamber music: one of the most versatile and daring journeys on the Italian scene
Despite the central place they occupy in Italian progressive rock, Le Orme remain a somewhat underrated band. The numbers speak for themselves: they were not only the most commercially successful act of that movement, but also the second best-selling Italian group at home during the 1970s, surpassed only by Pooh. Unlike Premiata Forneria Marconi, who were aiming for international ambitions, or Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, marked by a theatrical, grandiloquent approach, Le Orme developed a more introspective poetics. And while Area pushed progressive rock toward jazz-rock deconstruction and the most radical experimentation, the Venetian group instead stayed anchored to a deeply Italian emotional and melodic dimension.
Le Orme were able to absorb the vocabulary of British symphonic rock — Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Nice — and turn it into a formula in which harmonic complexity is rarely pushed toward the most extreme virtuosity, but is instead continually brought back to a formal balance in which arrangement, atmosphere and vocal line remain always immediately recognisable. Even in moments of the greatest symphonic elaboration, a melodic centrality persists, drawn as much from the tradition of Italian song as from the beat culture the group came from. This dual nature — popular and sophisticated, accessible and ambitious — also explains their broad appeal with mainstream audiences.
2. Marghera, Venice and the beat scene: the birth of an identity (1966-1968)
Le Orme were formed in 1966 in Marghera, in Venice's industrial outskirts, a geographical and cultural setting far removed both from record-industry Milan and from the television-variety Rome. It was a peripheral origin that would end up profoundly shaping the group's identity. On one side lay the working-class, industrial harshness of Porto Marghera; on the other, the suspended, watery, almost unreal dimension of the Venetian lagoon. It was precisely from the coexistence of these two opposite poles that the melancholic, contemplative sensibility took shape which Aldo Tagliapietra would years later call the "laguna sound". More than an actual musical movement, the "laguna sound" represents a cultural and emotional atmosphere. Tagliapietra links it directly to his early youth experiences on the Venetian islands, when at the start of the 1960s he played in Coral alongside other boys from Murano and the lagoon. It was still a hand-made, artisanal world, built out of Eko guitars, small Super Mb amplifiers, a beat repertoire and Shadows songs played at local parties and boat trips. In this almost domestic dimension, music was not yet experienced as a profession or a cultural avant-garde, but as an experience of identity.
Fresh from a songwriting contest for young singer-songwriters and by now impatient with a repertoire built exclusively on covers, Tagliapietra decided to start a new line-up alongside guitarist Nino Smeraldi (a decisive figure in the group's early compositional phase), bassist Claudio Galieti and drummer Marino Rebeschini. The band initially chose the name "Le Ombre", an obvious nod to The Shadows, a genuine technical model for entire generations of Italian musicians in the 1960s. The name was however quickly changed to "Le Orme", both to avoid the double meaning tied to the Venetian dialect expression "n'ombra de vin", and to set themselves apart from another Venetian band already active under that name. The group's first recordings still sat fully within the beat climate of the period. After a failed audition for Emi, the band signed with Carlo Alberto Rossi's Car Juke Box label and released the single "Fiori e colori" in 1967, backed on the B-side by "Lacrime di sale". Like many Italian acts of the time, Le Orme also recorded English versions of their songs — "Flowers And Colours" being the clearest example — in an attempt to break into the international market fuelled by the explosion of the British invasion. And yet, even at this early stage, the group showed traits that sat uneasily within the more conventional strand of Italian beat. Nino Smeraldi's songwriting tended to favour oblique melodic solutions and psychedelic atmospheres, while Tagliapietra's vocal sensibility introduced a lyrical quality far removed both from teenage immediacy and from the breezy irony of many contemporaries.
The first line-up change accelerated this process further. Shortly after the debut's release, Marino Rebeschini left the group for military service and was replaced by Michi Dei Rossi, a young drummer from Hopopi, one of the most important acts on the Venetian scene of the period. Hopopi were in fact one of the few Italian beat bands to gain a degree of international attention, even taking part in the Liverpool Beat Festival at the invitation of Los Bravos. Dei Rossi's arrival brought the group greater rhythmic solidity and helped consolidate their reputation as a live act. The real turning point, however, came in 1968. Le Orme began performing regularly at the Piper in Rome, a symbolic venue of Italian musical modernisation, and gained considerable visibility thanks to the single "Senti l'estate che torna", presented at Un Disco per l'Estate and reaching number 15 on the Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni chart. The B-side featured "Mita Mita", inspired by the magnetic presence of the young Mita Medici, a regular at the Roman Piper.
Shortly after recording the single, Tony Pagliuca, former keyboardist of Hopopi, joins the group. His arrival radically changes the band's sonic horizon. Thanks to the early earnings from the success of "Senti l'estate che torna", Pagliuca manages to buy a Hammond organ with a Leslie cabinet, an instrument still extremely rare and expensive in Italy at the end of the 1960s. It's a decisive step: the Hammond doesn't just add tonal richness, it introduces into Le Orme's sound that orchestral, solemn dimension that would end up turning a Venetian beat band into one of the founding cores of Italian progressive rock.
3. Ad Gloriam and Italian psychedelia (1968-1970)
Between 1968 and 1970 Le Orme went through their first true artistic transformation. It was the moment in which the group left beat music behind to search for its own identity, absorbing the influences of psychedelia and beginning to develop that taste for experimentation that would become central in the years to follow. In this phase the band's dominant figure was guitarist Nino Smeraldi. Cultured, passionate about literature and endowed with a strong creative personality, Smeraldi was the main author of Le Orme's earliest original repertoire. Aldo Tagliapietra would years later call him the "Venetian Syd Barrett", underlining not only his role as artistic guide but also the visionary nature of his writing. Like Barrett in the early Pink Floyd, Smeraldi pushed the group beyond the limits of traditional beat.
The end of the Sixties coincided, moreover, with a rapid transformation of the rock landscape. The emergence of figures like Jimi Hendrix and bands like Cream profoundly altered the language of young European bands: the beat song form suddenly began to seem insufficient, while psychedelia opened up new possibilities tied to improvisation, sound effects and studio manipulation. Le Orme too were inevitably drawn into this shift. However, their psychedelia still contained no genuinely transgressive or lysergic component: Tagliapietra would repeatedly recall how the Italian climate of the time was still essentially "parochial", a world away from the excesses of Anglo-Saxon counterculture. Le Orme's experimentation thus sprang more from musical imagination and aesthetic fascination than from any real adherence to the codes of international hippie culture.
This evolution found its landing point in Ad Gloriam, released in 1969. The record stands as one of the most important episodes of Italian psychedelia and, at the same time, one of the albums that best document the passage from beat to the emerging progressive rock. Even the cover, heavily indebted to psych aesthetics, signals the group's attempt to move away from the normality of Italian pop music. Within the album, relatively accessible melodic structures still coexist with a growing drive toward experimentation. Tracks like "Milano 1968", "Mita Mita", "Fumo" and "Io non so restare solo" show the group's openly declared debt to the psychedelic Beatles, especially in their use of the studio as a creative tool. Le Orme introduce guitar feedback to link tracks together, manipulated sound inserts and even brief reversed segments, as in "Casa mia". In one of the record's most curious moments, a sped-up voice even ironically asks: "Perché ascolti a 45 giri?" ("Why are you listening at 45 rpm?"), a further sign of a playful, experimental attitude still extremely rare in Italian rock of the period.
Despite its innovative value, Ad Gloriam proved a commercial failure. The group itself was well aware of the project's risky nature: the album's title was chosen with a certain self-irony, precisely because the musicians knew that a work so distant from the dominant pop music would hardly find room in the Italian market of the Sixties. "For glory", indeed. The record's failure also caused the split with Car Juke Box, who saw no commercial prospects in the new artistic direction the band had taken. On top of the commercial crisis came an internal one as well. In 1969 bassist Claudio Galieti left the group for military service and Tagliapietra was forced to move permanently to bass, a choice initially dictated more by necessity than by any precise artistic vision. Shortly afterward Michi Dei Rossi too was called up and was temporarily replaced by English drummer Dave Baker. But the decisive rift concerned above all the relationship between Nino Smeraldi and Tony Pagliuca. Behind the personal tensions lay two opposing ideas of musical evolution. Smeraldi continued to conceive of Le Orme as a band still built around the centrality of the electric guitar and British-style psychedelia; Pagliuca, on the contrary, began to imagine a sound dominated by keyboards. The incompatibility between the two visions quickly became irreconcilable. In 1970 Smeraldi decided to leave the group for good, depriving Le Orme not only of their lead guitarist, but also of their principal songwriter.
For the band it seems like the beginning of the end. Suddenly reduced to three members, the group finds itself without a stable compositional guide and, above all, without the instrument that had, up to that point, represented the very centre of their rock language. Paradoxically, it is precisely this loss that makes Le Orme's subsequent rebirth possible. Acting as a dividing line between the first psychedelic season of Ad Gloriam and the progressive turn with Philips sits a wholly singular release. In 1970 Car Juke Box put out the compilation L'aurora delle Orme (1970), aiming to cash in on the singles the band recorded between 1968 and 1970 (including "Irene", "Casa mia", "Mita Mita", "L'aurora" and "Finita la scuola"). Pressed by the label without any authorization from the musicians, the record was quickly withdrawn from sale. Its brief and troubled life has, in the following decades, made it one of the rarest and most coveted records among Italian rock collectors.
4. The trio and the symphonic revolution (1970-1971)
Smeraldi's departure in 1970 definitively closes Le Orme's psychedelic phase and ushers in what would become the band's historic lineup, which, reduced to a trio, suddenly finds itself forced to rethink its musical language. The electric guitar disappears from the band's architecture and keyboards take over. The main architect of this shift is Tony Pagliuca. More than the other members of the group, the keyboardist understands that the beat era is over and that European rock is rapidly heading towards more ambitious, layered forms. Crucial, in this sense, is his trip to London at the end of the 1960s, made possible by meeting journalist Armando Gallo. For an Italian musician of the time, the British capital represents a genuine culture shock: Pagliuca comes into contact with the post-Beatles scene and discovers bands like Yes, Nice and, above all, Quatermass, one of the first examples of a power trio built around the Hammond organ. The real epiphany, however, comes in August 1970, when Pagliuca convinces Aldo Tagliapietra and Michi Dei Rossi to set off for the Isle of Wight Festival aboard a Fiat 238 van together with a few friends. The trip soon takes on the shape of a naïve adventure: sleeping bags, boxes of pasta, a big pot loaded onto the van and a few bottles of prosecco along for the ride. Rather than lysergic drugs, what circulates around their campsite is white wine and makeshift spaghetti.
It was precisely in this context that Le Orme realised rock was definitively changing skin. The impact of Emerson Lake & Palmer's debut performance produced a sort of sudden revelation in the trio: a band with no guitarist could dominate the stage through the combined force of Hammond organ, bass and drums alone. The question the group asked themselves was simple: "If they can do it as a three-piece, why can't we?". Pagliuca then took on the role of true sonic architect of the band. It was he who pushed his bandmates toward more open, dynamic compositions rich in instrumental development. At the same time, the group deepened its knowledge of classical and baroque repertoire, beginning to imagine a language in which Hammond organ, rock improvisation and learned influences could coexist within the same musical architecture. To sustain the new set-up, the role of the Hammond became central. With no electric guitar, the organ had to simultaneously fill the harmonic space, generate rhythmic tension and build melodic openings, helping to define an identity immediately recognisable within the Italian scene. Tagliapietra's melodic bass, Dei Rossi's mobile, syncopated drumming and Pagliuca's keyboards thus began to build an original balance, further characterised by Tagliapietra's fragile, diaphanous voice. The first fruit of this phase was the 1970 single containing "Il profumo delle viole" and "I ricordi più belli", still somewhat unripe tracks that could have come off a Procol Harum record. They passed largely unnoticed and would only resurface in 2005 as part of the Studio Collection 1970-1980 compilation, released by Universal. They nonetheless remain essential songs for the group, marking their first encounter with producer Gian Piero Reverberi, a classically trained musician and refined arranger, among the most sought-after on the national scene. Shortly after, with his support, Le Orme would codify the style that made them famous.
5. Collage: the manifesto of Italian prog
The second studio album, Collage, comes out in 1971, at a time when Italian rock is undergoing a profound transformation. National prog has not yet taken on a defined shape. Released the same year as titles such as "L'uomo" by Osanna, "Terra in bocca" by Giganti and "Dolce acqua" by Delirium, Collage is, more than any of these, the record that best sums up their fundamental coordinates and makes them appealing to a wider audience. The trio holes up for a few weeks in a mountain hut in San Boldo, in the Belluno Prealps, working on the new songs. Surrounded by instruments, recorders and magnetic tape, they spend a month almost in seclusion together with Ezio De Rosa, a sound engineer who also acts as an improvised cook. Years later Pagliuca would ironically recall a huge chicken prepared by the engineer that fed them for two days straight, summing up that lifestyle with the motto "Sun, Fridge and Cabernet" – a thoroughly Venetian, domestic version of the more mythological "Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll". Having signed a contract with Philips, the band confirms Reverberi as producer. His contribution immediately proves decisive: Reverberi doesn't simply produce the record, but acts as a true mediator between the trio's instinctiveness and a more rigorous musical architecture. The band's image also changes radically. For the cover of Collage, the label wants a darker, more theatrical aesthetic, in the style of Black Sabbath. The three musicians are thus taken to a deconsecrated cemetery near Milan and covered in flour and white paint to shoot the album's famous photograph. After the shoot, forced to walk back onto the street still made up like ghosts, they end up unintentionally scaring passers-by, in a surreal scene that seems to perfectly sum up the clash between their provincial innocence and the new iconography of international progressive rock. The tracklist opens with the title track. Even though the intro recalls "Post War, Saturday Echo" by Quatermass, the most evident influence is that of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, with Pagliuca's Hammond organ charging ahead somewhere between rock and baroque music. The band's personality nonetheless manages to come through, resulting in a daring arrangement, with the piano hammering in, a harpsichord interlude (actually a Clavinet) quoting Domenico Scarlatti, and a final brass-driven celebration, courtesy of Reverberi. The result is a track more mimetic than what Keith Emerson would usually do, as it seems to want to transport rock back into the eighteenth century rather than bring the old into the present through rock. "Era inverno" is a melancholic march led by acoustic guitar, notable for its peculiar structure (verse, instrumental refrain, verse, instrumental refrain, bridge, instrumental digression, verse with ending) and for its sparing use of bass, absent for much of the piece except for a couple of moments where it shapes the melody. This absence of bass in guitar-dominated passages would recur in later records too, lending such passages a dry, immediately recognizable dynamism. Tagliapietra's voice, filtered through a Leslie effect, tells of love for a prostitute and stands out for its diaphanous falsetto, which would ultimately become the band's true trademark. Painted by a cascade of piano, played by Reverberi since Pagliuca was still getting to grips with acoustic instruments, "Cemento armato" is broken up by an amphetamine-fuelled jam, dominated by the Hammond and the tight pace of the drums. "Cemento armato, la grande città, senti la vita che se ne va" ("Reinforced concrete, the big city, feel life slipping away"), Tagliapietra thunders, in the first of a long series of lyrics so pessimistic that, read without knowing their origin, one might mistake them for the work of some existentialist post-punk band. The second side of the record opens with the album's most famous track, "Sguardo verso il cielo", played constantly at the time on Italian national radio's Primo Programma. It's a condensed showcase of Le Orme's art, a perfect calling card for anyone unfamiliar with them. Tagliapietra writhes in pain ("La forza di sorridere, la forza di lottare, la colpa d'esser vivo e non poter cambiare, come un ramo secco abbandonato, che cerca inutilmente di fiorire"), but finds refuge in a pastel-toned mysticism ("Uno sguardo verso il cielo dove il sole è meraviglia, dove nulla si fa mondo, dove brilla la tua luce"), poorly received at the time by left-wing militants. The Hammond takes on at least three different tones, lending great variety of colour, while the ethereal melody unfolds over a series of drum syncopations and riffs, stops and restarts, electric surges and acoustic interludes, flowing into a dreamlike ending marked by the hisses of a waveform generator (Moog and Mellotron would only enter the lineup from the next album onward). During one of the more intense moments the rhythm takes on an obsessive drive just a step away from the motorik pulse of German experimental rock of that period. The uncompromising approach of their German cousins is in some way also echoed in "Evasione totale", with a long free-form interlude where organ and generator plunge into echoes and distortions. There's still room, however, for more contemplative moments, like the obsessive bass line that opens and closes the track, or the keyboard embroidery vaguely recalling Ravel's "Bolero". "Immagini" is a melancholic pop sketch, three minutes of keyboards and voice, with no drums from Dei Rossi. Less reassuring is the closing "Morte di un fiore", which builds on acoustic arpeggios before growing into a crescendo, bringing in electricity, brass and angelic choirs. Like the album's first words, its last ones also speak of a prostitute, though the epilogue reads like a crime report: "Ti sei fatta ritrovare nel mezzo di un prato, dentro ai tuoi logori blue jeans. They said you looked like you were asleep, clutching your black hat".
Success is immediate: the album reaches number 3 on the Sorrisi chart, driven in particular by "Sguardo verso il cielo", which hits number 17 among singles.
6. Rag Doll Man: progressive meets pop
Still guided by Reverberi's production, who by now has become a kind of honorary member of the band, the trio is ready for the album that would bring mass success, Rag Doll Man, released in May 1972. In the meantime, the group begins to realize just how close its language is getting to the international standards of European progressive rock. During a stay in London, Tagliapietra, Pagliuca and Dei Rossi even manage to visit Keith Emerson, their main musical reference point. They find him fresh out of the shower, but the keyboardist proves extremely friendly and is surprised by the quality of their songs. Already from the famous cover by Walter Mac Mazzieri – one of the first in Italy conceived as a painted work specifically created for a rock album – emerges the intent to build a coherent, recognizable universe. Rag Doll Man unfolds, in fact, as a kind of fragmented concept album dedicated to the female universe: fragile, childlike, alienated or violated figures move through the record like characters out of an unsettling fairy tale, suspended between dream and trauma. Musically, the most evident change is the introduction of the Moog synthesizer, used by Tony Pagliuca in a pioneering way on the Italian scene, broadening the band's sonic palette with modern, visionary colours. The tracklist opens with "Una dolcezza nuova", which, after some variations revolving around the "Chaconne" from Bach's "Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004", turns into a ballad led by Reverberi's piano (Pagliuca still plays all the other keyboards on the track). "Gioco di bimba" is a folk ballad in 3/4 time which, despite its brevity, shows off a particularly intricate arrangement, between 12-string guitar arpeggios, joyful Moog melodies, bells mixed in the background, mandolin-like fragments imitated on guitar and electric harpsichord, and an a cappella interlude that sets up the entrance of a snare-and-cymbals march. The song is received by the public as a dreamy, fairy-tale-like lullaby. In reality, the lyrics seem to tell, in elliptical and metaphorical form, of violence suffered by a little girl. It is precisely this gap between melodic sweetness and narrative darkness that represents one of the most typical traits of Le Orme's poetics. "Figure di cartone" moves along the same lines, contrasting an airy folk-rock gallop – with acoustic guitar strumming drenched in echo and one of the most iconic Moog solos in all of prog – with the story of a girl locked away in an asylum (it's unclear whether by force or not, but in pre-Basaglia law Italy it wasn't uncommon, in some contexts, for the institution to be used as a tool of control, particularly against women deemed inconvenient or nonconformist). At the same time, the trio is also capable of a harsher vision. "La porta chiusa" seems to set a horror film to music, through anxiety-inducing interlocking keyboards and drums: in more than one passage it sounds like a foretaste of what Goblin would become. The closing "Alienazione", born largely out of a studio jam, lets the influence of Emerson, Lake & Palmer explode through odd time signatures, broken riffs and sudden rhythmic accelerations. It's the most aggressive and virtuosic side of Le Orme, placed however within a record that clearly favours compactness and melodic construction.
The success was enormous. The "Gioco di bimba" single reached number 3 on Sorrisi, while the album hit number 1 and stayed in the top 10 for nine months. This very popularity also generated the first strong tensions with part of the militant counterculture of the time. At festivals in the early 1970s the group was often heckled and booed by the more politicised fringes of the audience, who accused Le Orme of having excessively commercialised "pop" (funny to say now, but at the time the Italian press used that very term to describe progressive rock). In December 1972 Le Orme embarked on an Italian theatre tour with an exceptional guest: Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator, who opened the shows solo, accompanying himself on piano and acoustic guitar. It was an encounter destined to have significant consequences for the band's future too.
7. Felona e Sorona: a cosmology of Italian prog
Having defined the coordinates of Italian prog with Collage and shown its commercial potential with Rag Doll Man, the trio reached the peak of their ambition with Felona e Sorona. For the first time in their career, Le Orme built a true, unified concept album. Felona e Sorona abandons the relatively self-contained episodic structure of their previous work to develop a continuous narrative, suspended between science fiction, philosophical allegory and existential reflection. The genesis of Felona e Sorona unfolded through a twofold creative process that fuels its almost mystical character. The work's matrix was first born in the studio out of a fluid, free improvisation lasting about an hour, recorded live with no pre-set plan. To give shape and meaning to that tape, the three musicians then chose a singular strategy: a period of solitary meditation in which each isolated himself separately — Tagliapietra in Murano watching the glassblowers, Pagliuca on the beaches of Caorle and Dei Rossi in the Dolomites — to develop personal ideas and suggestions without influencing one another. Reunited to weave the material together, with Tagliapietra as the main author of the music and Pagliuca the creator of the lyrics and of the cosmic concept of the two planets, the group arranged the individual pieces into a single, imposing continuous suite. Crucial to this process was the direction of producer Gian Piero Reverberi, decisive in refining the joints between the tracks and in grafting on classical refinements (such as the fugal structure at the incipit of "Sospesi nell'incredibile"), giving the album a perfect architectural order. At the heart of the work lie two twin, opposite planets: Felona, bright and vital, ruled by harmony; Sorona, dark and motionless, sunk in a kind of cosmic apathy. But behind the appearance of a space fable lies a far more complex symbolic system. The two worlds embody a series of dualisms destined to run through the whole of Le Orme's poetics: light and darkness, life and death, happiness and pain, balance and dissolution. For one brief instant the two planets reach a condition of perfect symmetry, but it is a fragile, transitory harmony, destined to collapse into mutual annihilation. It is hard not to read in this cosmology a broader metaphor for the human condition and for the very modernity of the early Seventies: a universe poised between spiritual aspiration and disintegration, between the search for balance and an inevitable return to chaos. The structure takes the form of one long, continuous suite, with no breaks between one track and the next. "Sospesi nell'incredibile" opens Felona e Sorona with a genuine rock overture, built on a gradual accumulation of tension. The bass and keyboard lines overlap in a dense polyphonic weave, forming an elaborate fugato that leads into the entrance of the full band. Tagliapietra's clear voice then introduces the tale of the two planets, while the atmosphere grows progressively more suspended and dark: the bass takes on a melodic role, supported by keyboards in the upper register, creating a rarefied, estranging sonic space. The final acceleration, driven by Hammond and bass, leads into the dissonant Moog, whose solo carries the piece seamlessly into "Felona". Here the narrative gets into full swing, defining the two worlds through a sharp contrast of tone and expression. "Felona" presents itself as a luminous acoustic folk ballad enriched with tubular bells and festive tones, whose joy flows into the essentiality of "La solitudine di chi protegge il mondo", sustained by piano alone. The illusion of perfect harmony shatters, however, in the crescendo of "L'equilibrio", dominated by syncopated rhythms and a dizzying keyboard run. Side two opens onto pain with "Sorona", steeped in dark minor tonalities, before delving into the obsessive tension of "Attesa inerte", where Pagliuca's synthesisers and Moog explore cosmic territories and roaring avant-garde dissonances. After the lyrical suspension of "Ritratto di un mattino" — embellished by a guitar solo with the flavour of a baroque adagio — and the fleeting illusion of peace of "All'infuori del tempo", the work finally seals itself with "Ritorno al nulla": a monolithic, overwhelming sonic cataclysm that drags the entire universe into a monumental apocalyptic conflagration. The work's appeal also struck the British scene. Peter Hammill was deeply impressed by the record and offered to personally oversee its English version. He did not merely translate the lyrics: he rewrote them almost entirely, while keeping their dark, visionary character. It was Hammill himself who suggested the name "Sorona", derived from the English word sorrow.
The album's international version was recorded at Trident Studios in London and released by Charisma, the label of Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator. The celebrated saxophonist David Jackson, Hammill's longtime collaborator, also took part in the sessions, though his parts were later cut during mixing as they were considered too far removed from Le Orme's classic three-piece sound balance. The original tapes featuring Jackson's contributions would later be lost, feeding one of the small legends surrounding the record's history. For Le Orme, this was nonetheless an enormous achievement: few Italian groups of the period managed to gain such legitimacy within the British progressive circuit. The subsequent English tour further confirmed this unexpected international credibility. In a London pub, where the trio played as support act for Curved Air, the audience reacted with enthusiasm, even demanding four encores. On 11 November 1973 they also played the famous Marquee Club.
Without repeating the triumph of Rag Doll Man, Felona e Sorona confirmed the Venetian band's enormous popularity, entering the Sorrisi chart in April 1973, reaching number 2 and staying in the top 20 until November. The British market, however, showed little interest in the project, despite the strong live reception.
8. “Contrappunti” and the Limits of Progressive Utopia
1974 marked an especially delicate turning point for Le Orme. The group was going through a phase of enormous public exposure and intense live activity, also documented by In concerto, the first live album in Italian progressive rock. Recorded on 17 January at the Teatro Brancaccio in Rome, the record — though hampered by less-than-perfect sound quality — captures well the stage power the trio had reached by that point. The setlist includes a genuine rarity in Le Orme's history: the very long suite "Truck Of Fire", over twenty minutes long, sung in English and running through improvisations, instrumental sections and an extended drum solo. The track would never be recorded in the studio and would remain a kind of "ghost suite". The group initially opposed the idea of releasing a live album, only agreeing after being promised the record would be sold at a reduced, youth-friendly price. The promise would go unfulfilled and the album would come out at full price, feeding the growing suspicion of the militant counterculture toward the major record labels: this did not, however, stop it from reaching number 5 on Sorrisi all the same.
Just as Italian progressive rock reaches the peak of its popularity, the first signs of a stiffening in its musical language begin to appear. Before starting work on their new project, Tagliapietra, Pagliuca and Reverberi take a trip to Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka, in search of isolation and creative focus. It's a telling episode, because it reflects well the attitude the group adopted in those years: while Italy sinks into the Years of Lead and the political climate grows ever more radicalized, Le Orme choose to withdraw into an almost exclusively musical and spiritual dimension. With Contrappunti, released that same year, 1974, the band pushes toward a more erudite, cerebral and structurally complex style of writing, moving somewhat away from the melodic cohesion that had made Rag Doll Man and Felona e Sorona so immediate. Pagliuca delves ever more rigorously into classical studies, growing interested in counterpoint and twelve-tone technique. The group experiments with polytonality, fugues and highly elaborate rhythmic architectures, in an attempt to integrate the discipline of classical music into the language of rock. Tracks like the title track or "Maggio" clearly show this desire to build more sophisticated, layered compositions, often dominated by piano and keyboards rather than by melody. The result is a fascinating, at times extremely refined record, but also a more demanding one than its predecessors. Reverberi's contribution, ever more prominent, pushes the sound of Le Orme toward a more academic, controlled dimension. Years later Reverberi himself would admit that he had probably imposed an overly rigorous vision, partly stifling the melodic spontaneity that had characterized the band's earlier records. This transformation also takes place within a historical context very different from that of the early Seventies. The political climate becomes more radicalized, and a growing part of the youth counterculture demands a clear ideological stance from music. Le Orme, on the contrary, continue to stubbornly defend their artistic autonomy, rejecting both explicit politicization and the militant logic that is beginning to dominate many festivals and alternative circuits. Tagliapietra would later describe the group of that period as made up of "music Taliban": musicians completely absorbed in their own sonic research, almost isolated from the outside world. This distance from the dominant political discourse helps widen the rift with part of the alternative intelligentsia, who begin to view Le Orme with growing suspicion. Some tracks on the album, such as "La fabbricante d'angeli," are even read as conservative or moralistic, fueling further controversy.
The album peaks at number 7 on the Sorrisi chart, a result most Italian prog bands would envy, but one that marks a clear decline for Le Orme, the brightest star in that firmament. The only track to catch the wider public's attention — tellingly, the most straightforward one — is "Frutto acerbo," an intensely powerful acoustic ballad about the sexual urges typical of adolescence, swept through by angelic beds of Mellotron and string synth. Contrappunti nonetheless occupies a particular place in the band's history, capturing the moment when Italian progressive rock reaches its highest degree of aesthetic ambition, but also the moment when the formula begins to reveal certain limits and contradictions.
9. “Smogmagica“: California, Guitars and Mutations
After the stiffening of Contrappunti, the band entered a long transitional phase, searching for new directions without entirely renouncing their identity. In the summer of 1975 the single "Sera" was released, a track split between a verse marked by unusual accents and polyrhythms and a brisk chorus in which Clavinet and various synthesizers piled up, doubling the bassline, dictating the melody, underpinning the drums, laying down atmospheric textures, and so on. Despite its forward-looking sound, the single went unnoticed and the track was never included on any album (in 2005 it was finally remastered for inclusion on the Studio Collection 1970-1980).
This same period also saw the shaping of Smogmagica, recorded directly in Los Angeles. Le Orme attempt to engage with American rock and with more direct, blues-driven, guitar-based sounds. The trip soon takes on the air of a genuine adventure. Pagliuca would later recall the endless train rides from Mestre to Milan to obtain American visas, during which the musicians had to swear under oath that they were not communists before being allowed into the United States. The album marks the sharpest break from Le Orme's classical, symphonic past. For the first time since the late Sixties, the group abandons its historic trio format, bringing in a permanent electric guitar, entrusted to the young virtuoso from Treviso, Tolo Marton. The new sonic balance changes radically: Pagliuca's keyboards partly step back to make room for more aggressive riffs and an approach clearly influenced by American blues rock. Pagliuca would later lament that the record probably had "too much guitar," acknowledging that the group was still searching for a new direction. The initial absence of Gian Piero Reverberi also heightens the sense of disorientation. Deprived of the figure who for years had disciplined their musical language, the musicians suffer badly from homesickness and struggle to adapt to the Californian environment, remaining almost isolated from the local scene. The situation becomes so complicated that Reverberi himself is forced to join them in Los Angeles to help complete the record and salvage a production that is close to collapse. And yet, within this confused and uneven phase, important flashes of inspiration still emerge. Smogmagica alternates straightforward rock tracks like "Los Angeles" and "Laurel Canyon" with more atmospheric, suspended pieces such as "Laserium Floyd," a clear tribute to the Pink Floyd of "Wish You Were Here." The emotional high point of the record, however, remains "Friend of Yesterday," destined to become one of the most beloved songs in Le Orme's entire career. Born from a morning flash of inspiration that struck Tagliapietra, prompted by the wind and the sandy landscapes of California, the song suddenly recovers that melodic delicacy which seemed to have gone missing elsewhere on the album. Tagliapietra's acoustic twelve-string, Pagliuca's spacious synthesizers and Marton's harmonica build a rarefied, melancholy atmosphere that, as Pagliuca would put it, almost single-handedly makes the entire American experience worthwhile.
Released at the end of 1975, the album at first seemed to confirm the band's declining popularity, stalling at number 11 on the Sorrisi chart, but later reversed the trend: although it never climbed higher than that position, it stayed in the Sorrisi top 35 for a full 40 weeks, also boosted by the "Friend of Yesterday" single, which climbed as high as number 8.
10. “Hidden Truths” and “History or Legend“: Looking for New Directions
The disillusionment following the American trip also produced an ironic reaction. At the start of 1976 Pagliuca devised the "Rock-Spray" tour, a sarcastic take on the decline of prog that preceded the explosion of punk by quite some time, yet another proof that the two things were in no way connected. The show opened with a coffin carried onto the stage, out of which Pagliuca himself emerged, and continued with caricatures of disco music and the great rock icons of the day. This theatrical, grotesque turn led to the departure of Tolo Marton, who refused to go on stage dressed as Harlequin. He was replaced by seventeen-year-old Germano Serafin, also from Treviso. In the summer of that same year, while Smogmagica was still charting, the new line-up's first fruit arrived: "Canzone d'amore", a single destined to mark an era and the last collaboration with Gian Piero Reverberi, at least for the time being. Presented at the Festivalbar, "Canzone d'amore" gave the band its first number 1 single on the Sorrisi chart, even managing to knock "Margherita" by Riccardo Cocciante off the top spot. The arrangement combines the aura of the most romantic progressive rock (the lush string synths, as in contemporary Genesis productions) with the driving rhythms of funk (the syncopated interplay between guitars and drums). The result is a perfect pop song, worthy of the Electric Light Orchestra. Serafin slotted naturally into the Orme's sonic balance, restoring that equilibrium between guitar and keyboards that had always defined the band. Remarkably, "Canzone d'amore" was never included on any album, and only found a home in 1993 on the Antologia 1970-1980 (Mercury).
In 1976, with the very young Germano Serafin coming in on guitar to replace Tolo Marton, Le Orme fly to London to record Hidden Truths at Vangelis's famed Nemo Studios. It is the first album made without the longstanding support of producer and arranger Gian Piero Reverberi: a significant absence that gives rise to one of the band's most emblematic recording sessions, though the memories of the two founding members diverge sharply on what actually happened. In an interview, Pagliuca attributes the initial delays to a genuine creative block, born of the habit of working under Reverberi's formal discipline and an excessive harmonic rigidity the band imposed on itself. Pagliuca recalls days spent in the studio fiddling with ideas without ever finishing anything, to the point of telling the record label, when asked for news on the songs being written, that they were "still tuning the instruments." According to his account, the catalyst for the album was none other than Vangelis, first with a surreal gesture (he brought into the room a man who, for ten minutes, silently mimed a nonexistent trumpet solo before walking out), interpreted as an implicit message to stop being so uptight, and then with direct advice on the bass harmonies, pushing the band to let go of its formalism and complete the recording in just one week. Tagliapietra sees it differently: in his interview with OndaRock, he offers an opposite reconstruction both of Vangelis's presence and of the difficulties in London. Tagliapietra recalls visiting the Greek composer at his home, surrounded by greyhounds, but states that in the following days Vangelis never showed up at the studio, forcing Le Orme to produce the record entirely on their own. In the singer's memory, the main obstacle was not a creative block but the technical limitations of Nemo Studios: a space designed by Vangelis for the direct use of synthesizers, but completely lacking the acoustics needed to do justice to Michi Dei Rossi's drums and the guitars.
Hidden Truths recovers much of the Orme's historic melodic sensibility without entirely giving up progressive complexity. Dark tracks like "Vedi Amsterdam", with Pagliuca's aggressive, Bach-like organ and Dei Rossi's frenetic drum rolls, sit alongside more ethereal pieces such as "Radiofelicità", which blends poetic moments for piano and acoustic guitar, manipulated tape loops and hypnotic rhythms, or the title track, a gentle ballad accompanied by a string quartet, the first sign of the band's interest in chamber music. "Regina al Troubadour" brings the two opposites together, alternating delicate pop-folk passages with rough funk rock attacks. The lyrics tell of the end of the hippie era ("I buchi nei blue-jeans, anelli e perle al naso, hai preso tutto in fretta, lasciando la famiglia") and how the arrival of hard drugs ruined many of those who had lived that dream ("Regina al Troubadour, regina della neve, son tutti attorno a te, perché non sai dir no"). The song was chosen as a single and gave the band its second consecutive number 1 on the Sorrisi chart, while the album climbed to number 3 and stayed in the top 10 for six months: the band was back at the peak of popularity it had enjoyed in the early Seventies. An entirely English-language version of the album was also recorded (titled Hidden truth's), though it was never released.
The following year, with History or Legend (1977), the sense of the progressive era winding down becomes evident. Recorded in Paris, the album was solemnly announced by Le Orme as the record that would “mark the end of a cycle”. A work steeped in melancholy and elegance, it embraces simpler structures oriented toward song form. Yet far from being a step backward, the album reveals an unprecedented technical, production and arrangement competence, delivering one of the cleanest, most polished performances of the band's entire career. The vinyl is ideally split into two distinct sonic souls: the first offers a lighter, more romantic and acoustic take on their sound, dominated by Aldo Tagliapietra's narrative style. Standing out in this section is “Il musicista”, one of the band's most intimate and autobiographical songs, which reflects with disillusionment on the end of international dreams of glory and the exhaustion of life on the road. The second instead reveals a band still extremely curious and eager to experiment with new technologies. In “Se io lavoro” — a track born almost as a joke after Tagliapietra read a quip by Maurizio Costanzo in a magazine — the use of sequenced synthesizers, dominating both rhythm and melody, arrives ahead of almost all synth-pop, with the exception of Kraftwerk. There's no shortage of other refinements, such as the reggae hint in the cosmic-flavored verse of “Tenerci per mano” or the driving electric gallop of “Al mercato delle pulci”, embellished with a percussive introduction influenced by minimalist music.
The record gets roughed up by the militant critics, who judge the lyrics too detached, when not paternalistic or reactionary. Fortunately, this doesn't hinder its reach: both the album and the “Se io lavoro” 45 reach number 3 on the Sorrisi chart, confirming the band's magic moment. In retrospect, History or Legend demonstrates the creative effort of a group capable of capturing, with crystalline class, the end of the prog utopia.
11. “Florian”: the great refusal of electronics
Just as much of rock music is heading toward polyphonic synthesizers, electronic production and big stadium shows, Le Orme choose to stubbornly move in the opposite direction. Aldo Tagliapietra would later recall that choice with a telling phrase: "Against the current, like salmon." Thus comes Florian (1979), probably the most radical gesture made by any major Italian band in the Seventies. Le Orme decide to almost entirely dismantle their historic electric, symphonic setup, retreating into an intimate, acoustic, chamber-music dimension. It's a thoroughly anti-commercial choice, almost suicidal from an industry standpoint, but one that is precisely for that reason consistent with their history. The album's title recalls the famous Caffè Florian in Piazza San Marco, a symbol of an elegant, melancholy, timeless Venice. And it is exactly this suspended atmosphere that permeates the whole record. To bring about this metamorphosis, the group overhauls its instrumentation in an almost scientific way. Pagliuca abandons Hammond organ, electric piano and synthesizers to devote himself to piano, harmonium and harpsichord; Tagliapietra replaces the electric bass with cello; Dei Rossi gives up the traditional rock drum kit in favor of vibraphone, cymbals and small percussion; Serafin's electric guitar is gradually absorbed and replaced by mandola, violin and acoustic instruments. Making this transformation possible is the return of Reverberi. After the disorientation experienced during the recording of Smogmagica and Hidden Truths, the band calls back its longtime mentor to bring order and coherence to its new musical direction. Florian is perhaps the most elegant and anomalous record in Le Orme's entire career. The group's goal is no longer to impress through symphonic architecture, but to build a kind of "classical music that remains, still, a song." Within the arrangements one can clearly sense baroque and chamber-music influences that recall both Antonio Vivaldi and Edvard Grieg. Heard today, Florian is a surprisingly modern album. Without of course being able to conceive of it in these terms, the group anticipates a sensibility that decades later would come to be known as chamber pop. Tracks like "Florian" and "Il gran senser" perhaps represent the most extreme point of this exploration. Both entirely instrumental, they seem to evoke a motionless, timeless Venice through interweaving harpsichord, vibraphone and strings. "Il gran senser," in particular, takes on almost the value of a tribute to Venetian memory and popular wisdom: the "sensere" was the old Venetian broker, famous for his diplomatic skill and deep understanding of human nature. At the heart of the album, however, lies "Fine di un viaggio," the ideological manifesto of the whole operation. The song functions as a kind of polemical dialogue with "Mr. Tambourine Man": when Tagliapietra sings "Cambia Mister Tambourine Man, a me non servi più" ("Change, Mr. Tambourine Man, I don't need you anymore"), he seems to openly declare the end of the psychedelic, utopian illusions of the previous decade. A ballad in the verse and a martial parade in the chorus, it's arranged for acoustic guitar and percussion (snare drum and marching bass drum), with an interlude for violin and glockenspiel, plus a mandola solo at the close.
Despite selling less than the previous records, Florian achieves a surprising result given its anachronistic nature: it climbs to number 8 and stays on the Sorrisi chart for 30 weeks (14 of them in the top 10), while “Fine di un viaggio” reaches number 12 among the singles. It will be their last album to enter the Italian top 10, before the band's commercial trajectory begins a phase of gradual downsizing. Critics embrace the project enthusiastically and award the band the Premio della Critica Discografica Italiana.
12. “Little Rhapsody of the Bee”: against the current
Le Orme press on along this path, and in 1980 release Little Rhapsody of the Bee, recorded at their own private studio in Spinea. The album, however, is born into a much tenser climate. Philips openly voices its hostility toward continuing the chamber-music direction, fearing it could alienate the public in the long run, and deep divisions also emerge within the group itself: Pagliuca and Serafin want to keep moving in that direction, while Tagliapietra is more skeptical about it. The record reflects this uncertain situation. Little Rhapsody of the Bee retains the "chamber pop" framework inaugurated by Florian, but timidly reintroduces some more traditional rock and melodic elements. The figure who gives the work its particular character is above all Serafin, author of most of the music and increasingly central in shaping the band's repertoire. The guitarist and multi-instrumentalist also broadens Le Orme's tonal palette with the use of mandolin and charango, alongside acoustic guitars, violins and piano. The album thus retains considerable elegance, but feels less compact and radical than Florian. The pop immediacy of "Il treno" sits alongside the pastoral delicacy of the title track, built on the interplay between Pagliuca's piano and Dei Rossi's melodic percussion. "Raccogli le nuvole," also released as the single's B-side, introduces Serafin's charango in a rarefied atmosphere, while "Charango" exploits the instrument's brighter, more exotic character, putting it in dialogue with the bass and rhythm section. On "Fragile conchiglia," acoustic arpeggios and string textures support one of Tagliapietra's most intimate vocal performances, while "Buonanotte" closes the record in the guise of a lullaby, carried by gentle lyricism. Paradoxically, it is with this acoustic, sophisticated repertoire that Le Orme decide to take on dance halls and even discotheques, clashing head-on with the dominance of disco music. It's an almost perfect picture of their historical position at the end of the Seventies: a band that keeps stubbornly defending a crafted, cultured, human conception of music while the world around it is rapidly moving elsewhere.
The reception, however, is cold: the album stalls at number 18 on the Sorrisi chart and sales register a heavy setback. Particularly questionable is the choice of the exquisite but ill-suited title track as the lead single: an instrumental piece with a shifting structure, dominated by violin and marimba, it doesn't prove to be the most appealing choice for that historical moment. Peaking at number 21 on Sorrisi, it's the first single to miss the top 20 since “Sera”. This sudden decline marks the end of the relationship with Philips, the label that had launched them in 1971 with Collage. The crisis also marks the departure of Serafin, who leaves the band and the guitar behind to devote himself exclusively to the study of the violin (he would die prematurely in 1992 due to a serious illness).
13. The Eighties: survival and crisis
At the start of the Eighties, faced with a radically changed musical landscape, Le Orme decide to put themselves back in play by exploring new horizons. Signing with the young label Ddd marks the beginning of a phase of deep renewal. With Venerdì (1982), the group approaches the electronic and new wave sounds of the period with curiosity. The lyrics are written mostly by Alberto Salerno, a historic figure in Italian pop songwriting, who manages to adapt remarkably well to the band's style, while the music remains entirely the group's own work. Crucial to this transition is producer Roberto Colombo, recalled with admiration by Tagliapietra as a "great and stimulating" professional. Under his skilled guidance, the group changes skin once again, adopting electronic drums, digital synthesizers and even a small Casio VL-1, elegantly weaving emerging technology into their arrangements. As Tagliapietra himself would admit years later, the intention was to follow the new electronic direction "while still keeping our own footprint." The singer-songwriter has in fact widely reassessed Venerdì, calling it a record "full of unusual, successful moments," one that has grown more and more rewarding over time. Worth noting at the very least are "Biancaneve" (somewhere between Ultravox and Japan, with that exotic instrumental refrain marked by metallic percussion and vibraphone), "Venerdì" (an instrumental driven by a relentless mechanical pulse over which a crystalline piano part stands out, its dreamlike feel strikingly anticipating certain Nineties dance music, think of Robert Miles), "Storie che non tornano" (a genuine post-punk charge, with a minimal, prominently placed bassline) and "Marinai" (new romantic synth-pop with a chorus swept by a majestic choir, strongly marked by heavy use of filters and sound effects). Tied to this last track is the traumatic compromise of taking part in the 1982 Sanremo Festival. The song the group initially presented was titled "Marghera" and contained fairly explicit references to the industrial and environmental decay of Venice's outskirts. The Festival's artistic direction and the record label, however, intervened heavily on the lyrics, deeming the chorus too provocative and forcing the group to change it to the more neutral "Marinai." For Pagliuca, already going through a period of deep spiritual and personal unrest at the time, the episode marks an irreversible breaking point. The keyboardist experiences the whole Sanremo ordeal as a profound artistic humiliation: not only because of the censorship of the song, but also because of the artificial atmosphere of the Festival and the dynamics of television, ever further removed from the "hand-crafted" idea of music the group had cultivated throughout the Seventies. Disgusted by the whole context, Pagliuca physically leaves Sanremo before the final night. Le Orme are thus forced to perform in an almost surreal situation: in place of the keyboardist, Roberto Colombo appears, miming the keyboard parts, while Aldo Tagliapietra stubbornly insists on singing live, standing out in an edition dominated almost entirely by playback.
The album reaches number 18 on the Sorrisi chart, and “Marinai” achieves the same placement among the singles: for the band, these will be their last top-20 placements on either chart.
A few months later a further single is released, “Rosso di sera”, which goes largely unnoticed despite the band's attempt to launch it with a television appearance on Canale 5, on the show Popcorn. The track is a triumphant synth-pop worthy of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, while Tagliapietra's vocals, with their challenging tonal range, seem in some way to anticipate the simultaneously radio-friendly and refined style of Mango. The song will not be included on any album and today is only available on a 2009 reissue of Venerdì put out by Sonny Boy Management, which was not even remastered.
For the rest of the Eighties, Le Orme all but cease to exist as a coherent artistic entity, limiting themselves to sporadic live appearances and another troubled Sanremo appearance in 1987 with "Dimmi che cos'è," which unfortunately fails to match the brilliance of "Marinai" (released only as a single, it stalls at number 23 on the Sorrisi chart).
The crisis reaches its most evident point in 1990 with the album Orme, released after returning to the Polygram/Philips orbit. The record appears worlds away from the creative independence and stylistic exploration of their classic works. Produced by Mario Lavezzi and artistically supervised by Mogol, the album relies on outside musicians, professional songwriters and the production logic typical of late-decade Italian pop, none of which delivers the hoped-for results: the commercial flop is resounding, as shown by its peak at number 45 on Sorrisi, which is also the last chart appearance of their career. It is probably the moment when the rift between Le Orme's past and present appears most evident.
14. The Progressive Return: “Il fiume” and the New Trilogy (1996-2004)
At the start of the Nineties, while the landscape in Italy appears hostile, abroad a new wave of attention toward Seventies symphonic rock slowly begins to emerge. The neo-prog scene, which had already taken shape in the previous decade around bands like Marillion, helps reassess many of the great European progressive acts, turning them into cult objects. Le Orme too begin to be rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. The decade opens traumatically, though. In 1992 Pagliuca leaves the group for good, worn down by its commercial drift and estranged from the artistic direction the band had taken in previous years. For Tagliapietra and Dei Rossi it is an enormous loss: Pagliuca had not simply been Le Orme's keyboardist, but the chief architect of their sonic imagination. To keep going, the group turns to keyboardists Michele Bon and Francesco Sartori, opening a new chapter in its history.
During these years the Orme go through a kind of slow reconstruction of identity. For a brief period they even venture into repertoires foreign to their past: in 1991 they take part in the TV show Sapore di Mare, performing covers of "4/3/1943" by Lucio Dalla and "Generale" by Francesco De Gregori. Shortly after, in the 1993 concerts, they instead start paying tribute to the history of Italian and international prog, working into their sets songs by Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Premiata Forneria Marconi, New Trolls, as well as Joe Cocker and Bob Marley, accompanying it all with period images and footage. It's an important shift: the Orme stop chasing contemporaneity and begin to openly recognize themselves as part of a historical tradition. The audience changes nature too. In 1993 the National Orme Fan Club is founded in Spongano, in the province of Lecce, and it quickly becomes the main point of reference for a community of fans now far larger and more international than in the Seventies. The fan club's fanzine — distributed to thousands of members, promoters and record labels — often makes up for the majors' lack of interest, playing a decisive role in rebuilding the group's myth.
In the same period both Tagliapietra and Pagliuca release new solo work, a sign of creativity that keeps moving even outside the historic Orme name. But it's above all the renewed enthusiasm found on stage that convinces Tagliapietra and Dei Rossi to attempt something that, until just a few years earlier, had seemed impossible: a genuine return to progressive rock. Thus comes Il fiume (1996), released on the small independent label Tring. It's the album that kicks off the Orme's second life. Freed from commercial pressures, the band openly reclaims its historic language: long suites, recurring themes, symphonic openings and symbolic lyrics return to the center of their writing. The album's concept revolves around the metaphor of the river as a representation of human existence: the spring near to God, the rough course through the valleys, and finally the merging into the sea become images of becoming, memory and transformation. Musically the record alternates strongly melodic moments with long instrumental sections that explicitly recover the Orme's classic vocabulary. Sales, though far from even their most recent past, manage against all expectations to cover production costs: Tring itself hadn't believed much in the project and had asked the group to immediately record Friend of Yesterday (1997) right after, a collection of old songs rearranged, meant to offset any financial losses.
With Elements (2001), Le Orme deepen this progressive revival further. After the departure of Francesco Sartori — who would go on to enter the pop world of Sugar and collaborate with Andrea Bocelli — the group brings in violinist and pianist Andrea Bassato. Elements unfolds as a long suite devoted to the four natural elements (earth, air, water and fire) and is probably the most explicitly "Seventies-leaning" record of the band's second phase. Alongside reviving its typical symphonic arrangements, it introduces Eastern sounds through the use of the sitar, an instrument Tagliapietra had begun studying in previous years. This is prog now free of any anxiety about modernizing, with the band seeking simply to perfect its own language.
This journey culminates in 2004 with The infinite, the final chapter of the new trilogy. The album ideally closes the arc centered on becoming and human transformation, striking a very mature balance between orchestration and songwriting. Although somewhat held back by production budgets not always equal to their ambitions, these albums show a band now fully at peace with its own historical identity. Visually too, Le Orme consciously choose to rebuild their own myth. For the covers of Elements and The infinite, the group turns to Paul Whitehead, the legendary illustrator behind the covers of Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator, who had already created the artwork for Smogmagica. It's not a random choice: Le Orme openly reclaim their place within the great tradition of international progressive rock.
In these years the band's public perception also changes for good: the Orme attain the status of a true classic. Their reputation solidifies especially abroad: in 1997 they're invited to the Los Angeles ProgFest as the sole Italian representatives, opening a long run of international festivals across the United States, Canada, Brazil and Mexico. The internal balance, however, soon cracks again. In 2008 Bassato leaves the lineup, forcing the Orme to temporarily regroup as a trio. Despite the defection, Dei Rossi and Tagliapietra plan a new studio record and complete their annual tour with Tolo Marton as special guest. In early 2009, after an initial run of shows as a three-piece, the lineup is permanently expanded with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Fabio Trentini, promising to revive gems of the repertoire long absent from the stage.
15. The Final Rift: Splits, Legacy and Battles Over Identity
By the end of the 2000s, Le Orme are no longer just a band, but a true institution of international prog, especially live. Behind this renewed consecration, however, tensions that were never truly resolved keep simmering. The definitive breaking point comes in 2009. At the end of a Canadian tour, Tagliapietra cuts ties with Dei Rossi and the other members of the band, opening a rift that proves impossible to heal, both personally and artistically. From that moment on, two different ideas of historical continuity coexist. On one side, Dei Rossi decides to officially carry on Le Orme's activity, building an expanded lineup with Michele Bon, Fabio Trentini, Jimmy Spitaleri of Metamorfosi, William Dotto and Federico Gava. This incarnation of the group keeps the repertoire alive through tours and prog festivals, trying to preserve the band's name and its place in public memory. On the other side, Tagliapietra chooses to carry on under his own name, backed by a new lineup with whom he releases albums such as Nella pietra e nel vento (2012) and L'angelo rinchiuso (2013), which recover some of the melodic sensibility and spiritual lyricism typical of the band's classic phase. L'angelo rinchiuso, in particular, almost seems to want to pick up the threads left open by Felona e Sorona, confirming just how much Tagliapietra continues to regard that era as the true symbolic center of his artistic identity.
The singer's departure immediately triggers a bitter dispute over the band's name. Tagliapietra asks his former bandmates to give up use of the "Le Orme" name, but the matter ends up in court. The most significant episode takes place in 2010 at the Prog Exhibition in Rome, when Tagliapietra reunites on stage with Tony Pagliuca and Tolo Marton. The three want to bill themselves as "Once Were Le Orme," but a legal cease-and-desist blocks even that nostalgic formula, and the concert is advertised simply as "Tagliapietra Pagliuca Marton." For many fans, it is nonetheless the closest thing to a true reunion of the classic lineup. Yet even this attempt quickly runs aground: the old artistic and personal differences between Tagliapietra and Pagliuca resurface almost immediately, preventing any new joint work from coming to life.
On the opposite front, Dei Rossi carries the official name forward with a series of new releases: titles like The Silk Road (2011), the bilingual reworking Felona e/And Sorona (2016), ClassicOrme (2017) and On the Wings of a Dream (2019) testify to a stubborn determination to preserve the historic catalogue. Pagliuca's path, by contrast, is more withdrawn. After his 1992 departure, the former keyboardist moves increasingly away from rock to devote himself almost exclusively to spirituality and liturgical music. Over the years he composes works such as Messa di Natale, Via Matris and Rosa Mystica, even going on to collaborate in 2015 on Wake Up!, a musical project built around the speeches of Pope Francis.
Meanwhile, the official version of the Orme continues through the 2010s amid internal changes — with Spitaleri leaving in 2012 to return to Metamorfosi — and celebratory festivals. When in 2023 Dei Rossi tries to bring the old historic members together around a new commemorative project, Tagliapietra turns down the invitation. The story closes with a legacy split between official claims and philological fidelity. While credit goes to Dei Rossi for the tenacity of having safeguarded the brand and the live presence, for many fans the absence of Tagliapietra's lunar timbre and Pagliuca's harmonic architecture reduces the later lineups to a distant echo. What remains intact, however, is the historical substance that reaches far beyond the boundaries of the extraordinary initial trilogy of Collage, Rag Doll Man and Felona e Sorona, the golden peak of Italian symphonic rock. The band's true defining trait lies precisely in that creative restlessness which drove it, right up to the threshold of the Eighties with Venerdì, to keep exploring new languages: from chamber music to American rock, from avant-garde synth-pop to the singer-songwriter tradition. A journey in constant evolution, capable of wrong-footing audiences, anticipating trends, and remaining among the boldest chapters in our music.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
