Vitulia

Description

Vitulia, literally “land of the calves,” those animals sacred to Helios, the Sun God, is one of the ancient names once given to my Sicily — a place of fascination, beauty, warmth, contradictions, and caprices. I have been fortunate enough to experience its most genuine and unpolished side since birth, having come into the world in one of the many small inland towns at the very center of the island, where there is not much, and where life unfolds slowly.
Growing up nourished by its quiet grace, I became intimately familiar with that typical Sicilian rhythm — unhurried, suspended, almost contemplative. Yet this rhythm has often clashed with my own restless temperament, driven by curiosity, impatience, and ambition. Out of this tension grew the conflicted love many Sicilians feel for their homeland: a mixture of deep affection, frustration, longing, and pride, bound together in a way that is difficult to explain but impossible to escape.
My musical upbringing was equally contradictory. It began with classical studies, surrounded by my father’s rock records, the late-’90s dance music that inevitably permeated the air, radio pop, and the most disparate cover bands I found myself involved with. Then came the era of broadband internet — a blessing and a curse — bringing with it a kind of musical bulimia. Jazz, fusion, synthesizers, electronic experimentation, computer-based music: so many different forces pulling in so many directions, apparently incompatible yet all equally fascinating.
Throughout the years, I went through phases of intense study and “focus” on one genre or another, trying to understand their language from the inside. But nothing ever managed to silence my multiform curiosity. I have always believed that beauty is not confined to one style, one tradition, one era. It can emerge from a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart idea, a Miles Davis solo, a production choice, or even a single DX7 patch. Why deny oneself any of that? In the name of what?
I began studying the piano when I was barely more than an infant, and all this musical variety eventually had to confront the towering legacy of the great composers. Their presence set, in my mind, compositional standards so high they felt unreachable. Writing an electronic track or a song seemed, in comparison, relatively approachable. But composing for the piano — the very instrument through which I first discovered music — felt like stepping onto sacred ground. How could a young musician from inland Sicily ever hope to stand in the shadow of such giants?
Then jazz arrived. And with it, at last, composition became an act of instinct rather than judgment — a moment-to-moment expression, a breath of freedom. Many of my musical heroes moved effortlessly from a Prelude and Fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier to an improvised blues, unconcerned by boundaries or categories. Watching that fluidity, that courage to be multiple, something inside me finally unlocked. Suddenly, everything began to make sense.
Only in recent years have I found the kind of stylistic coherence I had been unconsciously searching for in my own compositions. This album is the result of that slow, sometimes tortuous, often revelatory process. It gathers pieces that I am proud to have written and that feel, for the first time, simultaneously honest and complete. I entrusted them to the piano — my companion through every phase of my life — because it remains the instrument that can speak my musical truth most directly.
In this music, inevitably shaped by the breath of classical tradition, I feel the scents of my Sicily: its warmth, its melancholy, its contrasts. I hear the echoes of all the musical loves that have crossed my path. I recognize the genres and languages that, over time, have become part of me, intertwined in a way that is no longer contradictory but organic, natural, even inevitable.
This album is not an attempt to reconcile these influences once and for all — that would be impossible, and perhaps undesirable. Rather, it is a snapshot of an ongoing voyage: the journey of a musician shaped by an island both generous and demanding, by a childhood spent between silence and sound, by years of exploration, doubt, discovery, and devotion.
I no longer ask myself whether one can find unity among so many different musical identities. I have learned, instead, that unity often emerges precisely from multiplicity — from allowing oneself to be porous, curious, permeable to the world. These pieces are the result of that openness. They carry within them the slow winds of the Sicilian hinterland, the restless energy of my youthful hunger for sound, the weight of classical rigor, the breath of improvisation, and the persistent desire to find beauty wherever it hides.
If these notes accompany you as you listen, I hope they offer a glimpse into the landscape from which this music was born — a landscape both real and interior. And I hope that, in some small way, the piano will speak to you as it has spoken to me: as a bridge between the many worlds that coexist within a single life, and as a reminder that contradiction can itself be a form of harmony.