Celtic Music in Italy

wonderful night for all of us (we were just a group of tourists going around, and I didn't even know anyone of them, before then). The Irish too, seemed very happy about our performance! It was a great surprise to see, going out of the pub, that it had just won the prize as "best music pub of the year"!

SG: Are there many visiting performers to concerts and festivals in Italy? Maybe Keltica could get involved in setting up a festival?

ADP: Concerts and festivals are mostly in the North of Italy, and usually they are very crowded and successful. As far as I know, ALL the artists I interview would love to come and play in Italy. When I ask "Why?" their answers are more or less the same: the food, good wine, the weather, the art treasures, the women (!)...A Keltika festival could be an idea, too - something I have talked about with the editor of Keltika, Raffaello Carabini. Let's hope... Apart from that, every year in August here in Palermo there is a festival organized by WOMAD. A couple of years ago I remember clearly a great gig by Shooglenifty, with all the people dancing around...it seemed that the trees too of the Teatro di Verdura, a wonderful open-air theatre, would begin to dance...

SG: Are you interested in Italian traditional music? How strong is Italy's own tradition? Is there much cross-over between Italian and Celtic music?

ADP: And this too is a very interesting topic! After all "Italy" is a relatively young nation. Unlike nations such as France, Spain and Great Britain, it was unified only in 1870, and before then there were several political realities. This reflects also in the "Italian" folk music, in my opinion: simply there isn't an Italian folk music, I think, but folk music from Sardinia (wonderful!), Naples (maybe the most popular), Puglia, Tuscany, Rome, Sicily, Genoa, Turin and Piedmont and so on...each one of them is really very different from each other, and for the same reason the market for each one of these music is very small, almost "regional". It may seem strange, but often I can know about the most recent Italian releases thanks to magazines such as Folk Roots and Songlines! There are some folk magazines in Italian too, but the ones I mentioned are surely more reliable.

SG: I recently came across a cd "Riportando Tutto a Casa" by the

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