The sequel was written in the seventies. It just took thirty years to record. Metamorfosi had planned to follow Inferno straight up through Dante, then the market collapsed under them and the band stopped, and the second half of the idea sat in a drawer while everyone got older. Spitaleri and Olivieri put the group back together in the nineties, started talking about Paradiso again around 2000, and finally cut it in the summer of 2004 — skipping the middle canticle entirely, because the hell had a heaven waiting for it and the purgatory could come later. It should not work at all. It largely does.

The short version

Their third album, released in 2004 on the small Progressivamente label, CD only at the time, fourteen tracks, about fifty minutes. Jimmy Spitaleri sings; Enrico Olivieri plays piano and keyboards; Leonardo Gallucci plays bass and classical guitar; Fabio Moresco plays drums. Spitaleri and Olivieri wrote all of it, words and music, as they had in 1973. Guido Bellachioma produced. A 2019 edition reissued it on CD with two live bonus tracks and on vinyl with ten of the fourteen pieces.

The thirty years in between

Inferno came out in 1973, sold better than anything else they did, and was not enough. The Italian scene emptied out over the following two years and Metamorfosi emptied out with it. Spitaleri made two solo records at the turn of the eighties, the first of them under the name Thor, records built almost entirely around what that voice could do. Olivieri stayed in music. In the nineties the two of them started playing together again, a few concerts at a time, and the unfinished trilogy came back into the conversation. Turbitosi and Herygers are not on this album; the band that recorded it is the two founders plus a new rhythm section, and it is worth being straight about that.

The sound

Less dark, by design. You cannot write a heaven with the same organ chords you used for the pit, so the record opens out: the keyboards are wider and more modern, the arrangements are lighter and less granite, the classical guitar does work no Metamorfosi record had room for before, and there are stretches of real tenderness. The two constants hold. Spitaleri still sings like a man addressing a congregation, with more control than he had in 1973 even if a little less thunder; Olivieri still writes the harmony for everybody. The production is clean and contemporary rather than a period reconstruction, which is the album’s best decision — nobody here is pretending it is still 1973.

Reading up on Italian prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

It climbs, and the structure is Dante’s: an introduction, then the heavens in order — the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn — then the fixed stars and the Empyrean at the top. The ascents between spheres get their own short movements, exactly the way the circles got theirs on Inferno, so the two records rhyme in shape even when they do not in mood. Cielo di Marte and Empireo are where the old band comes fully back, weight and drive and Spitaleri at full stretch; Cielo di Venere, Il Sole and Stelle fisse are the warm ones, and they are also where the criticism lands, because the melodic writing there sits close to Italian pop and some listeners never get past it. Fourteen tracks, no filler, no epics.

Reception and legacy

Better received than anyone expected, which tells you what people expected. The reunion album by a seventies band that made one classic is a genre with a bad record, and reviewers went in braced for a self-tribute; most came out saying it was modern, well made, professional, and continuous with Inferno rather than parasitic on it. The honest ceiling is also agreed on: it is not a masterpiece and it is not Inferno, and the lighter half of the album is genuinely divisive. The band took it out live, played Rome in June 2004 and NearFest in Philadelphia the following month, and in December performed it in a Roman church on acoustic instruments and the building’s pipe organ — a recording issued years later as La chiesa delle stelle, and arguably the best thing to come out of this era.

The verdict

Worth hearing, once Inferno is in you. Do not start here and do not expect the same record; treat it as the second act it was always meant to be, play it in order, and give the church-organ live version a listen straight afterwards. The trilogy did close: Purgatorio arrived in a limited edition in 2014 and got a proper release in 2016, more than forty years after the door of hell opened. Very few bands ever get to finish the sentence they started. Fewer still finish it this well.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →