Everybody says this record arrived too late. The better argument is that it could not have arrived any earlier. Locanda delle Fate are a second-generation band: unlike every other great name in Italian progressive rock, their core did not form on beat, on blues-rock or on the music of Woodstock, but on the already mature progressive gospel coming out of England. Their first original songs were modelled from the start on what were by then classics of the genre — King Crimson, Genesis, Gentle Giant, Yes. A style this finished was simply impossible in Italy before 1977. It is also the reason nobody bought it.

The short version

Their debut, and for twenty-two years their only album: released on Polydor in 1977, fifty minutes, seven tracks including two that run past nine. The band came from around Asti and had formed in 1974, spending years playing covers and listening hard to other people’s prog before writing their own. Leonardo Sasso sings; Michele Conta plays keyboards; Alberto Gaviglio and Ezio Vevey play guitars; Luciano Boero plays bass; Giorgio Gardino plays drums; Oscar Mazzoglio plays keyboards. Seven men. The band arranged it themselves. It came in a fold-out cover with the lyrics on a custom inner sleeve.

1977

The year is the whole story. Progressive rock was dying in Italy as it was everywhere; the big historic groups — Banco, PFM, Le Orme — were all taking the road towards pop, and Area were, tellingly, silent on record that year. A few people were still trying: Gianni Leone of Il Balletto di Bronzo put out a first solo album from America under an alias, Gramigna dusted off Canterbury. But by 1977 Locanda delle Fate could fairly be called the only prog group in Italy — with all the complications that followed from it. Critics greeted the album as one of the most accomplished examples of romantic progressive made in this country. It sold nothing.

The sound

The influences are all findable and all blended, with a romantic and genuinely original touch on top. A volte un istante di quiete opens the record and is instrumental, recalling Banco and Genesis in turn and showing what these players could do. But the strength of the album is the writing and the singing. Sasso — a bearded giant — has a voice somewhere in the neighbourhood of Francesco Di Giacomo, which in Italy is the highest possible bar, and the interplay between the seven of them is perfect. The production is faintly provincial and completely clean, no frills, and the record holds up next to Museo Rosenbach, Alphataurus, Banco and PFM.

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The songs

The title track runs nearly ten minutes and turns on the contrast between dreams and reality, opening out into a world of quiet. Profumo di colla bianca is over eight. Vendesi saggezza closes at nine and a half. Cercando un nuovo confine, Sogno di Estunno and the short Non chiudere a chiave le stelle fill the rest, and the composing stays at the same height across all of it — there is no filler here, which for a debut by seven men in 1977 is remarkable. The 1994 CD adds New York as a bonus. In 2012 the band finally issued The Missing Fireflies: the studio versions of pieces that could not fit on the original LP, plus live material from a 1977 concert in Asti.

Reception and legacy

Nothing at the time, everything since — the LP is now remembered as one of the finest things Italy produced in the seventies, and the band belong among the best of Italian prog without argument. The reservations are real and worth having: it is heavily indebted to British prog, one of the most derivative Italian records of its kind, and the words carry a certain heaviness. And then the same critic who says that concludes that the album is of an extraordinary refinement and that no words can compensate for the pleasure of hearing it. The timing was a genuine shame. As he puts it, quoting the poets: time waits for no one.

The verdict

Essential, and one of the two or three best places to end up once you know the famous Italian records. Play it whole, in order, with the lyric sheet if you read Italian. Then Museo Rosenbach’s Zarathustra and Alphataurus, which is the company it keeps. The band broke up in 1980 after two more singles and reformed decades later without their singer. Seven men from Asti made one album at the exact moment the audience for it disappeared, and it turned out to be permanent anyway.

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