GIUSEPPE MOSCATO - Riflessi lontani

Among the small gems that the year just ended gave us is the latest work by singer-songwriter Giuseppe Moscato, a Folkstudio-trained artist born in a rented room in Rome and raised, both as a person and as an artist, among the streets of the Centocelle neighborhood, later alongside an entire generation of songwriters who helped give Italian song the shape, the meaning and the emotional tenor of its most human, real and "committed" strand. We're talking about voices like those of Antonello Venditti, Francesco De Gregori, Stefano Rosso, Ernesto Bassignano, Giorgio Lo Cascio. For someone like him, the Resistance is "a private matter", and telling its story by giving voice to its lesser-known protagonists, those left at the margins of history books, is a stance - a necessary one, too - now that the reasons of democracy seem to be running out of oxygen and we struggle to tell sincere voices apart from false or, in various ways, artificial ones.

Pino is the son of craftsmen who remains a craftsman in music. On this album, a concept record about the Resistance, we find the story of the Riminese partisan courier Rosina Donini, the words and poetry of Maria Antonietta Moro and Primo Mazzolari, and material drawn from the diaries and letters collected by Mario Avagliano in "Generazione ribelle", or by Alessandra Povia Valdimiro in the documentary "Radio Cora Gruppo Bocci".

Now, in these final days of January, we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. Memory, indeed. Never as this year has the atmosphere surrounding such a meaningful and civically important occasion felt so paradoxical. It's paradoxical to witness, side by side, generic mourning for past victims and renderings that plan to throw recent and future ones into the sea. Along with their rubble. In the name of "peace". Because it has always been more profitable to erase memory than to preserve its integrity. It's also paradoxical to speak of the Holocaust in a world where having worn a swastika or having declared a wish to exterminate the disabled and homosexuals are forgivable youthful pranks that institutional commitment can wash away. Amid these paradoxes, a record like "Riflessi lontani" helps us go back to basics. Namely, to the fact that there is no historical memory of the Holocaust without anti-Nazism and anti-fascism, and vice versa: the victims of the Holocaust are historical victims, and history, unfortunately, repeats itself. The testimonial and narrative value of "Riflessi lontani" also takes the form of a multimedia song-theatre piece created by Moscato together with actors Tiziana Fusco and Osvaldo Di Cuffa of the Centro Teatro Internazionale in Florence, where the show will premiere on March 14th.

Moscato's songs, in a world that dehumanizes the weak, speak of "distant reflections", of emotions, of the private, inner soul of those of our dead who once made the first seeds of a freedom we too often take for granted blossom - ultimately, of their humanity. To tell this story, he draws inspiringly on the language of our classic singer-songwriter tradition, and precisely for that reason it feels current, letting his voice and guitar ring out with purity and with arrangements that are delicate yet incisive. As the artist explains: "I wanted to write in verse and sing feelings that I believe are part of each of us, feelings that have neither time nor space. I immersed myself in their stories to understand what remains, in our eyes, of their finished lives. I believe that, on the other side, still today as yesterday, they are fighting for a fairer world. Of all that suffering, what remains are the words, and the words bear witness to a time beyond time".

A foundation of memory that is important to listen to, so as not to forget to keep resisting.

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28/01/2026