Fiore di vita

Fiore di vita

PM

Italian

Apulian vernacular

Raccolta 001 - 01

This is probably one of the most original songs of the repertoire, composed probably Manduzio. From a form standpoint, the song belongs to the category of the stornelli, a popular music genre which originated in the north-central Italy (Tuscany and the Lazio area, around Rome), between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The stornello is normally a monostrophic composition with strophes of three hendecasyllables in rhyme. Quite common is a variant with a first five-syllabled line beginning with fiore di… (blossom of), just as in Fiore di vita of the sabbatini. Since the beginning of the 20th century the stornelli had become one of the most popular music genres, spread throughout the country, from the north to the south, performed especially in agricultural working milieus. Since the late 1930s, however, the forms of the stornello had conquered the newly born but growing Italian music market, at that time under strict political censorship. In 1938 Italian Fascism had emanated the racial legislation, had declared war against the “plutocratic” powers (mainly Great Britain and the United States), and set out on a new “autocratic” socio-economic and cultural course where the role of music was to exalt the values of agricultural society and rural simplicity, in contrast with the Anglo-Saxon patterns of civic-technological and metropolitan modernity. The stornello was sufficiently popular, formally simple and catchy and at the same time formally malleable to satisfy fully the requirements of the Fascist regime.