Among the little jewels that the year just ended has given us is the latest work of the Folkstudio-trained singer-songwriter Giuseppe Moscato, born in a Roman sublet and raised humanly and artistically in the streets of the Centocelle district, then alongside a whole generation of authors who contributed to giving the Italian song the form, meaning and emotional tenor of its most human, real and “committed” declination. We are talking about voices like those of Antonello Venditti, Francesco De Gregori, Stefano Rosso, Ernesto Bassignano, Giorgio Lo Cascio. For someone like him, the Resistance is “a private matter” and telling it by giving voice to its submerged protagonists, on the margins of history books, is a choice of field, also absolutely necessary, today when the reasons for democracy seem to be running out of oxygen and we almost struggle to distinguish sincere voices from false or, in various ways, artificial ones.
Pino is a son of artisans who remains a craftsman in music. In this album, a concept on the Resistance, there are the events of the Rimini partisan relay Rosina Donini, the words and poetry of Maria Antonietta Moro and Primo Mazzolari, those of the diaries and letters collected by Mario Avagliano in “Generazione rebellious”, or by Alessandra Povia Valdimiro in the documentary “Radio Cora Gruppo Bocci”.
Now, in these days at the end of January, Remembrance Day is celebrated. Yes, memory. Never like this year has the atmosphere surrounding an anniversary so full of meaning and high civil value been paradoxical. It is paradoxical to witness the general condolence for the victims of the past and the rendering who plan to throw recent and future ones into the sea. Along with their rubble. In the name of “peace”. Because it has always been more profitable to remove memory than to preserve its integrity. It is also paradoxical to talk about the Holocaust in a world in which having worn a swastika or stated that you want to exterminate the disabled and homosexuals are forgivable nonsense that an institutional commitment can wash away. In the midst of these paradoxes, a record like “Riflessi distance” helps us start again from the basics. And that is from the fact that there is no historical memory of the Holocaust without anti-Nazism and anti-fascism and vice versa: those of the Holocaust are historical victims and history unfortunately repeats itself. The value of testimony and narration of “Reflections distant” is also expressed in a multimedia theater-song version created by Moscato together with the two actors Tiziana Fusco and Osvaldo Di Cuffa of the Centro Teatro Internazionale of Florence, where the show will debut on March 14th.
Moscato's songs, in a world that dehumanizes the weak, speak of the “distant reflections”, of the emotions, of the hidden and subjective soul of those of our dead who one day allowed the first seeds to flourish of a freedom that we have too often taken for granted, ultimately of their humanity. To narrate it, he uses in an inspired way the language of our most classic and therefore current songwriting, making his voice and guitar resonate with purity and with delicate but incisive arrangements. The author explains: “I wanted to write in verse and sing feelings that I am convinced are part of each of us, feelings that have neither time nor space. I thus immersed myself in their stories to understand what remains of their lives concluded before our eyes. I believe that on the other side, still today, like yesterday, they are fighting for a more just world. The words remain of all that suffering and the words are the testimony of a timeless time.”
A foundation of memory that is important to listen to, so as not to forget to resist.
01/28/2026
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
