Biography and anecdotes are left out of this “anarchic and poetic tale” where the words live outside the accompanying music. There is also room, however, for a few song excerpts, performed with intensity and poetic vigor by the actress. Alongside the protagonist is the talented accordionist Giulia Bertasi, who does not limit herself to mere accompaniment, but becomes herself, in many cases, a dramaturgical complement, in emphasizing intimate atmospheres between the tragic and the ironic […]. Marco Menini, Hystrio
In the history of Italian pop music there are singer-songwriters that we could call poets. One of these is Piero Ciampi. He disappeared in January 1980, a misunderstood artist, a “cursed” son of 1960s/70s Livorno. To many he was just a desperate alcoholic with a violent temper, to some of his closest friends he was “The best of us all.” Our performance aims to be a journey inside his universe. To do this, we have used only and exclusively the words of his songs and a couple of his poems, thus realizing a recital that investigates the existential and poetic journey of his soul. His songs, wine, escapes, and loves in the great poetry of Piero Ciampi, an exceptional character who will reinvent our art music. As a poet, maladjusted to the system and outside the rules, in his work his life is a door that opens wide into the darkest and (im)possible worlds of postwar Italian song and culture. A life at the precipice: outside the logic and the box, the path of a different person who had all the makings of an artist.
