Battiato taught us that three minutes can say as much as a thousand-page book

Exactly thirty years ago Franco Battiato released L’imboscata, his nineteenth studio album. A landmark record, not only because it gave the world La cura, one of the most beautiful songs in Italian music, but also because it cemented his partnership with Manlio Sgalambro, the philosopher and lyricist who wrote many of the Sicilian songwriter’s lyrics. A collaboration that began in 1994 and lasted almost twenty years, during which the music of one and the words of the other broadened the horizons of the Italian canzone d’autore, opening it up to new philosophical and linguistic possibilities.

Anniversaries exist to bring back to light what is worth remembering. That of L’imboscata is a chance to return not only to La cura, but to Battiato’s entire body of work and to his ability to turn a song into a tool for knowledge.

Battiato was, in a sense, also a discoverer and a populariser. He owned thousands of books and could start from a concept, an image or an intuition and build a song around it. It is this tireless curiosity, together with Sgalambro’s philosophical research, that brought into his lyrics words, places and references we would hardly have come across anywhere else. This approach had an incredible side effect: it widened the range of what a song could do, turning songs into genuine tools of discovery.

Suddenly, faraway places entered our imagination: the Nevsky Prospekt, the grand avenue of Saint Petersburg, of which Gogol wrote that no inhabitant of that city would trade it for all the gold in the world. And it makes you think that “prospekt”, a perspective, is a beautiful way to name a street, one that even leads us to rethink the very idea of a street.

But also unknown figures and traditions, able to spark questions like: who are the whirling dervishes? What sound does a Kathakali anklet make? Does Radio Tirana really broadcast Balkan music? Where do the trains for Tozeur leave from?

Battiato’s songs thus also become literary and philosophical discoveries. It is like when, reading a book, you come across a concept or a word whose meaning you did not know. And so you look it up, follow a trail, discover others. And, almost without noticing, our imagination expands to make room for new tools for understanding the world.

Listening to Battiato is, in this sense, a kind of treasure hunt, where the treasures are the new lenses through which to look at reality and the keys that open parts of the world we did not know before.

When you think about it, this is exactly the work that books do. And so perhaps Battiato’s greatest legacy was showing the world that the three minutes of a song can say as much as a 400-page book.