Chapter 11, Rock and Romanticism, Lexington Books

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Chapter 11 in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is “The ‘Scapigliatura‘ and Poètes Maudits in the Songs of Piero Ciampi (1934–1980),” pp. 153-164, by Lorenzo Sorbo, Ph.D. in Musicology, University of Milan.

Lorenzo Sorbo’s “Themes of ‘Scapigliatura’ and Cursed Poets in the Songs of Piero Ciampi (1934–1980)” engages Italian Romanticism, its critics, and its reinvention in the 1960s and 1970s in the music of Piero Ciampi. After defining traditional Italian Romanticism as “moralizing and patriotic” and later Italian Romanticism as “languid and sentimental,” Sorbo describes the rise of a new kind of Romanticism in the later nineteenth century called the Scapigliatura. This group took its name from French Bohemians of the earlier nineteenth century. Its members were critical of previous Italian Romanticisms and attempted to modernize Italian letters through the influence of European and American literature by figures such as Poe and Baudelaire. Sorbo then proceeds to identify the Italian singer/songwriter Piero Ciampi as clearly working in the tradition of the Scapigliatura, both in his life and in his lyrics, so that Ciampi represents a restatement or reinvention of late nineteenth-century Italian Romanticism, one that resonates with British and European Romanticisms of previous periods.

Get the iTunes playlist. Note: there are very few Ciampi songs available on Apple Music, so I included all songs available in the playlist. Some are discussed in the chapter, some are not.

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