Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2007

The great traveler Fosco Maraini knew about a dozen languages. As a person always looking ahead, in the 1960s, he decided to invent a thirteenth language with phonemes and sounds chosen according to the taste they would create when bouncing on the palate, peeping out through the lips and settling in the ear. So here are the Fanfole, poetic compositions written in an Italian of multiple and changing meanings, spoken in a parallel universe. In the late 1990s, singer-songwriter Massimo Altomare and Stefano Bollani set them to music. Now everything has a second life in this book-CD, embellished by Fosco’s voice, and the parallel universe he made up is coloured by joyful melancholia. Maybe that language belongs to the past, and yet, it could be new, fresh and founding, for what you hear emerging is sometimes nostalgia for the future, for a world where you are welcomed by “lenuli ripagni”, and where days are all “gnacchi” and “timparlini”.

Il lonfo non vaterca nè gluisce

e molto raramente barigatta

ma quando soffia il bego a bisce bisce

sdilenca un poco, e gnagio s’ archipatta

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