Poet, musician, writer, Massimo Bubola is a central figure in Italian singer-songwriter music . His poetics has profoundly influenced the Italian music scene, starting with Fabrizio De André, with whom he wrote and composed two historic albums such as Rimini and L'indiano, as well as the song Don Raffae'. He also collaborated on great popular songs such as Il cielo d'Irlanda.
Massimo Bubola, however, is also a sensitive, evocative, engaging narrator, capable like few others of tying together the threads of memory and reviving a past that takes on the characteristics of legend, of popular myth. Bubola's latest literary work, Rapsodia delle terre basse (Neri Pozza, 2024, pp. 192, also e-book), demonstrates this. It is a long ballad, set in the Veneto region of the 1950s, a folk-rock novel in which Massimo Bubola, like a magic piper, gathers a caravan of bizarre souls, fruits of a tree that has its roots in the centuries, and tells their stories.
"Rapsodia delle terre bassa", in fact, collects the stories of a rural community of the time that was , a community that still lives on myths, visions, popular beliefs and that relies on the wisdom of the mad and the elderly and the innocence of children to find answers to its doubts and fears. In Bubola's book, the soul of a world probably lost forever pulsates, but still capable of speaking to us in a narration that keeps the reader perpetually balanced between history and enchantment, between reality and dream.
We then asked Massimo Bubola, first of all, where the events narrated in his book originate.
"The stories I tell in my books come from many sources. From what I have experienced, from what I have read and from what I have dreamed. However, the greatest source from which I draw, and which has influenced my poetics, comes largely from my childhood in a large and patriarchal peasant family, who lived in the Mesopotamia of Italy, in Veneto between the Adige and the Po, and the events of this book were also the result of stories that I have elaborated over time and that I have heard told by my parents and my grandparents."
In the stories you can sense a nostalgia for a peasant, village world...is that so?
"Yes, as I was saying earlier, I spent that first part of my life, on a large farm, surrounded by uncles and cousins in a small town in the lower Veronese area on the border between Padua and Rovigo. So I remember that atmosphere well, the families, the people and the nicknames. As a child, I was lucky enough to attend, in the summer farmyards and in the winter stables, the narrations of elderly people who recounted extraordinary and amazing facts to entertain an audience of all ages. So the stories had to involve everyone with understandable, surreal and powerful stories that created silence and attention everywhere. So for this book I drew on that peasant epic where I grew up."
In the book you can feel how the protagonists are part of a community. How important could it be today to recover the community dimension that peasant life often had?
"Being part of a community means feeling involved, protected and participating in everyone's life since childhood. I think it's one of the most beautiful and invigorating sensations I've ever felt in my life. In fact, I've always tried to reproduce that climate and that humanity that surrounded me since I was a child and made me happy and to give it to my children and friends, having grown up in the city, even if times were now changing so radically and that world has largely disappeared. I think that writing books of this kind is for me an attempt to bear witness to at least a little of that happiness, even if it was a spartan and sober life. Mine is also an attempt at compensation, for those who were not lucky enough to know and live that world."
A central character in the book is Don Luigi, the parish priest, an unusual figure for a small rural town in pre-economic boom Italy…
"Don Luigi is certainly a person who has a strong altruism and suffers from his condition as a parish priest, which in the 1950s in a small Venetian village was a position of strong social power. He therefore lives a sort of dichotomy between his charitable, courageous and uncompromising spirit with his status as religious and civil authority. Don Luigi expresses a constant intolerance for the rules and conventions of respectability to which his role forces him. In fact, he expresses this restlessness by smoking even in inappropriate situations, wears long hair and plays the guitar. A sort of beat priest ante-litteram".
Finally: what is the difference between writing lyrics for music and dedicating oneself to literature?
«Writing a novel, using a sports metaphor, is like moving from the 100 meters of short literature, such as the poems and songs I have dedicated myself to the most, to the longer distances of narrative that we could compare to races like the 10,000 meters or the marathon. The style, however, does not change with the distance, because I always use a writing with a sound and with internal metrics. I believe it is like creating a large fresco with the care and meticulousness of someone who paints miniatures. So it is a denser and more accurate writing, which has a strong character of synthesis: in fact some literary critics have spoken in this regard of poetic prose».