The band is named after a bakery. Premiata Forneria Marconi — the Award-Winning Marconi Bakery — was the sign near their first rehearsal room in Chiari, outside Brescia, and taking it was a statement: no more beat-group names with a definite article in front, no more English. In January 1972 the album under that ridiculous name went to number one in Italy one week after it came out, which no Italian album had ever done. Everything you know as Italian progressive rock starts here, thirty-four minutes long, made by five session players with a Moog they had not paid for.

The short version

Their debut, recorded in Milan in 1971 and released in January 1972 on Numero Uno, seven tracks, thirty-four minutes. Franco Mussida plays guitar and mandoloncello; Flavio Premoli plays piano, Hammond, harpsichord, spinet, Mellotron and Moog; Mauro Pagani plays flute, alto flute, piccolo and violin; Giorgio Piazza plays bass; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums. Everybody sings, and the singing is deliberately faint and far away, which is one of the most Italian things about a record that keeps getting compared to English ones. Every piece was written by Mussida and Pagani. One lyric was not: Mogol wrote it, and it changed the band’s life.

The bakery, the Moog and Mogol

These five were not beginners. PFM grew out of I Quelli, one of the best-known beat groups in the country, and its psychedelic offshoot I Krel; between them they had backed De Andre, Battisti and Mina in the studio and supported Procol Harum, Yes and Deep Purple on stage, and when they were assembling the definitive line-up the names in the frame included Alberto Radius and Ivan Graziani. Then there is the Moog. The story the band tell is that they found one in a shop, were transfixed, and could not remotely afford it — so they made the owner an offer: lend it to us and you will sell ten more. He handed it over. They used it to record Impressioni di settembre, with words by Mogol, and released it in October 1971 as the B-side of their first single. The A-side was La carrozza di Hans. It was the B-side that opened the door.

The sound

Baroque, occasionally medieval, and audibly in love with early King Crimson and Jethro Tull — and then, underneath, something none of those bands had: the Italian classical tradition, from Vivaldi to Puccini, and a melodic instinct that no English progressive band would have dared indulge. Premoli turns the group into a pocket orchestra, moving between harpsichord and Hammond and Mellotron and Moog inside single pieces; Pagani’s flute and violin argue with Mussida’s guitar; Di Cioccio plays like a man who has studied Michael Giles very closely. The comparison people reach for is Genesis around Nursery Cryme, and it is fair as far as it goes. What it misses is that this record swings, and that it can be joyful, which Genesis in 1971 could not.

Reading up on Italian prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

Introduzione does what it says, on Mellotron. Impressioni di settembre follows and is the most famous piece of music Italian progressive rock produced — a low guitar note, Mogol’s words about dew and morning, and then that Moog theme sitting up above everything, the moment the old instruments and the new ones stopped being separate things. E festa is the other side of the band entirely: a tarantella, a Moog line moving impossibly fast, violin and guitar in unison and counterpoint, and a rhythm section hitting like Led Zeppelin raised on the slopes of Vesuvius. Dove... quando... is split into two parts to make the band’s double nature unmissable. La carrozza di Hans, which had already won first prize at the Viareggio avant-garde festival in 1971, is the small masterpiece. Grazie davvero closes on acoustic guitar and a Mellotron pretending to be a brass section.

Reception and legacy

Number one in a week, which had never happened. Ten months later Per un amico arrived and 1972 became the year Italian progressive rock stopped being a promise. Then Manticore, Sinfield, America, Japan, and a career that has not ended yet. Fifty years on the album is still played whole, still sounds fresh, and still gets described as one of the greatest records Italy ever made in any genre — not a qualified great, not great-for-a-first-album. The only real argument about it is whether Per un amico is better, which is the kind of argument you want to have. Impressioni di settembre outgrew the band entirely and belongs to the country now.

The verdict

Essential, and the first Italian progressive album anyone should hear. There is no case for starting anywhere else: it is short, it is generous, it is technically astonishing and it never once makes you work for it. Play it whole, in order, and then play Per un amico. Then Banco’s Darwin for the other throne, Le Orme’s Felona e Sorona for the third, and Photos of Ghosts if you want to hear how this got to England. A borrowed synthesizer, a bakery sign, and a lyricist on loan. Thirty-four minutes. An entire scene.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →