I am never sure whether a charivari of musical items interspersed with readings really works on CD, though it may well succeed in the concert-hall. Actually, in this case the spoken texts represent the best part of the programme: admirably read, they combine with the music to paint a vibrant picture of life in Italy around the time of Dante. Extracts from the Cronica of Salimbene de Adam describe such colourful characters as Friar Trumpet – a kind of Pied Piper with his huge following of children bearing branches and carrying lighted candles. And then there is that hilarious Friar “God-help-you” tumbling about on the ice. Salimbene’s own rapturous contemplation of the starlit sky is followed by a typical descent from the sublime to the prosaic: he confesses the sin of gluttony when delighting in a dish of ravioli... “sine crusto di pasta”.
Gastronomic satisfaction extends to an extract from a fourteenth-century cookery book with instructions on how to prepare lasagne. Another writer, Franco Sacchetti, tells delightful anecdotes about Dante himself, including one which relates the poet’s visit to a blacksmith and his dismay at hearing him recite by heart a distorted version of his lines – an incident shedding light on the popular memorizing of long stretches of verse and an almost universal love of story-telling.
The music, varied and attractive notwithstanding a few problems of pitch, aims at completing a picture of a busy, devout, happy-go-lucky people, not so far removed from their twentieth-century descendants.'