DIMARTINO - L’improbabile piena dell’Oreto

Ondarock's recent chart dedicated to the essential albums of Italian singer-songwriter music had, among its other merits, that of reminding us how slippery the very definition of cantautorato can be. It's a word that, used carelessly, ends up meaning everything and nothing: the author who sings their own songs, a guitar front and centre, a certain thoughtful posture, a few autobiographical fragments left in plain sight. When it truly means something, though, it calls into play a deeper balance, made of words and sound, private storytelling and collective imagery, song form and world-building.

“L’improbabile piena dell’Oreto”, the new solo album by Dimartino, arriving seven years after the excellent “Afrodite”, sits squarely within this category. After the years spent alongside Colapesce and the huge exposure of “Musica leggerissima”, Antonio Di Martino returns to a more intimate, secluded, almost domestic dimension, where every sound seems to have to justify its own presence. It's his most autobiographical record in a long while: ten tracks far removed from radio-friendly ambitions and from any idea of turning success into a repeatable formula. He put it best himself: a folk album with no hits. A simple, almost disarming statement that captures the nature of the project perfectly.

Within this choice moves a recognisable stylistic genealogy, never flaunted as a direct reference. There's something of the freest Battisti, of the most intimate and theatrical Lucio Dalla, of the crooked, luminous melodies of Enzo Carella. The shadow of Piero Ciampi shows in the willingness to leave the shame of emotion exposed, while the closest affinity seems to point to the second phase of Niccolò Fabi's career, the one marked by subtraction, detail, maturity as a space for questions. It's a tradition that resurfaces here still mobile, still capable of shedding its skin.

The sonic material is consistent with this trajectory. Everything grows around the acoustic guitar, the record's true backbone, but the piano plays an equally decisive role whenever it enters: essential, intense, expansive. Around these cores are grafted a female choir, strings that widen the depth of the storytelling, and a delicate, sinuous electronic layer that never overpowers - a fine-tuning job that blends into and enriches the acoustic material.

Dimartino has said he imagined the flow of water through the sound of a synthesiser, opening and closing the cut-off until he found a tone resembling the flow of the river. It's a technical detail that reveals a lot: the electronics work in transparency, turning the image of water into a physical, almost tactile presence.

The Oreto, the river that runs through Palermo, is the organising principle of the whole album. The songs flow one into the other, outros become intros, and clean-cut pauses disappear. Born clean and then dirtied by contact with the city, the river takes on a moral and poetic value: it penetrates history, gathers debris, compromises itself and keeps stubbornly seeking the sea. Its mouth, marked also by the wounds of the sack of Palermo and by ferocious over-development, adds a concrete, almost civic dimension to the metaphor.

The unlikely flood of the title holds all of this together: a remote possibility, almost absurd, yet still alive. Like a river everyone considers dead that might still burst its banks; like an adult who, after work, children, losses, disillusionments, broken promises, wonders whether they're still capable of feeling anything.

The sequence of tracks chosen as previews - “L’oro del fiume”, “Meravigliosa incoscienza”, “Agua, ¿dónde vas?” and “Contemplare il cielo attraverso le dita” - has worked almost like a progressive map of the album.

“L’oro del fiume” is the most elegant point of entry: a sober, restrained song where the figure of the prospector becomes a metaphor for escape, for an invisible cage, for a desire for freedom expressed with a light step. Water, the search, the margin, the promise of something that shines and perhaps can't be possessed: there's already a great deal of the album in this first current.

“Meravigliosa incoscienza” is one of the passages where the album reaches its most accomplished form. The delicate, evocative piano introduction opens up a suspended space: a few extended notes, almost chanson-like, move forward lightly before letting in a fuller, more substantial body of sound. Here also enters the 'u sugghiu, a legendary creature from Sicilian tradition, suspended between reptile and mammal and linked to marshland and stagnant waters. Dimartino recovers it from his grandfather's stories, turning it into an apparition of childhood fear, and does so without postcard folklore, like an image left buried in memory. The monster is approached, two boys go to meet it in order to recognise it and defuse its fear. It's one of the album's finest ideas: the everyday remains concrete, physical, caked in mud and fear, but a visionary crack allows it to reveal itself in all its unease.

The nod to Federico García Lorca in “Agua, ¿dónde vas?” widens the field further. Water becomes a question about time and the fate of simple things: the river, the tree, the birds, the rose. The song searches for a language somewhere between nursery rhyme and vertigo, while its South American inclination opens a crack in the album's Mediterranean folk. The river's imagery then expands further in “Conrad”, more of a sound painting than a song: the female choir evokes the dark, psychological atmospheres of “Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad's famous novel, and shifts the course of the water from the Mediterranean to the Congo, where travelling upriver also means travelling back in time, toward a remote origin of the world and of the self. In this passage you can clearly sense the nature of an album that fuses Sicilian history and introspection, folk narrative and adult unease, deliberately steering clear of radio-hit logic.

“Contemplare il cielo attraverso le dita” shows the record's most openly melodic side. The echo of Modugno surfaces as a harmonic memory: a popular gait, an old-fashioned progression, a suspended question about the substance of adult life. It's one of the songs where Dimartino seems to come closest, most naturally, to that line of songwriting that is simple yet rich, melodic in measured doses, popular in its stride and anything but complacent.

If childhood supplies the album with its monsters and its apparitions, adulthood hands it the reckoning. “Gusci vuoti” reopens a wound already present in early Dimartino, that of generational defeat, shifting it into a different age. Former schoolmates find themselves at a funeral, measuring the distance between who they imagined becoming and what life actually gave them. The harshest truth lies in the ordinariness of disappointment: teenage dreams almost always fade away without a sound, leaving behind only meagre objects, remnants, shells indeed.

"Storia della mia rabbia", placed at the close, pushes the journey to its flood point. Rage becomes a creature that has grown up alongside us, an inner animal we've tried to tame with love, with reason, with habit. Dimartino narrates it with a rare ability to give it a body: a living presence, almost like a person met again after years, perhaps believed dormant, perhaps only put back in its place. It changes rooms, it grows old with us, it can run into another rage born of a new wound and even end up clashing with it. Within the same person, several emotional floods coexist, several opposing currents, several unreconciled versions of one's own darkness.

The album's cohesion stems from a very precise idea of crossing through: the most immediate moments and the more subterranean ones echo each other, building a personality that grows with every listen. The record asks you to enter its current, to follow its course, to accept that some passages hit you right away while others work by accumulation, until they reveal their full temperature in the silence surrounding them.

In its acoustic flow, in its careful use of space, and in its choice to let emotion breathe, "L'improbabile piena dell'Oreto" puts back into circulation some deep coordinates of Italian singer-songwriter tradition: words that probe and question, a melody run through with memory, a guitar that carries the pace of the story, and a landscape capable of becoming autobiography. The urge to strip things down also extends to how these songs will be performed live, solo, voice and guitar, without pedals, loop stations or pre-recorded backing tracks. At a time when everything seems mediated, polished, corrected, the image of the singer-songwriter alone in front of an audience regains a small political force: a necessity of presence, even before being a choice of format.

Dimartino returns to the river to find out whether something, inside himself and inside these songs, can still overflow. The answer moves with the quiet pace of water that keeps flowing beneath the surface, even when no one is watching anymore.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

13/05/2026