In Ferrara I used to sing in Coro Polifonico “Santo Spirito”, where we performed mostly baroque sacred music. I was very proud of that hobby, that allowed me to sing in prestigious theaters together with famed orchestras and world-class directors. Unfortunately when I moved to Florence I had to give up on this activity and I missed it a lot.   I tried to look for something similar in my new location but couldn’t find anything that matched my time budget and my taste.

For three long years Caterina tried to have me join The Pilgrims, a gospel choir.  I went to see one of their concerts and I liked it but, you know, jumping from Mozart’s Requiem to Happy Days is a big leap and I didn’t feel like I could do it.  Luckily enough, a few months ago Caterina eventually convinced me to give it a try and… it’s great!  I ended up joining their group – so now I am a Pilgrim – and already performed in five concerts!

What makes The Pilgrims great is not the songs we sing, even if there are some really good.  It’s not the musical skills, even if we sing everything by heart and the soloists have amazing voices.  It’s not the red tunic and the choreography we make dancing on the stage.  What makes it great are the choir members.  They are very energetic, friendly, inclusive and I have lots of fun with them!  And when you have fun performing the attendance has fun as well, which by the way is the goal of our performances.

I’m very thankful to Caterina for all the fun and the emotions I got in the concerts and for everything else that will come!  Damn, if only I joined them three years ago…

Few days ago I’ve been at the Madison Square Garden, arguably the world’s most famous arena. New yorkers simply call it The Garden, as if it were the only garden out there, or worse, as if it were a garden at all! Well, actually it’s not even on Madison Square. Thanks to wikipedia I discovered the current name is just a legacy from the original arena, that one century ago used to be located in a garden at Madison Square.  Anyhow entering the arena is impressive: you feel like getting into a temple, a place where people go to worship their idols. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they do there!

The show on stage was a basketball match in the College Hoops league, between St. John’s and Pittsburgh. I went with Carla, a friend from New York. She likes college basketball and taught me all I had to know and something more, e.g. that college teams usually have the name of an animal (Pittsburgh Panthers) but St. John’s is an exception (they call themselves the Red Storm). We took the obligatory beer (that they served us with a built-in pretzel) and brought it in.

Before the match started an actual singer sung the national anthem, everybody standing, hats off. Pitts were much stronger and they easily blew out St. John’s 81-57, but it’s been fun anyway. The home team had cheerleaders, dancers and a fanfare band and shot t-shirts to the public during time-outs. Much fun!

Too bad I’m already back to Italy.

This was taken last September at the Ferrara Balloons Festival.  There were many huge balloons, some of them with crazy shapes.  You could even buy a ticket to ride one.  An interesting thing: I discovered balloons are better flown in the morning or in late afternoon, apparently because the hottest and coldest hours make navigation harder.

Last time I’ve been in New York, one night Ale brought us to Ludlow Street. Ale is a fan of Lower East Side, and I definitely approve his taste. That area is filled with strange and interesting places, for both dining and having fun. That night Ale brought us first to the Back Room (which I already knew, maybe I’ll talk about this in a different post) and then to Mehanata, a Bulgarian bar and dance floor.

You have to know it in advance, cause there’s no hint from outside. No name on the street, just a small door no different to an normal entrance to apartments. When you’re in, you find yourself in a bar room, brick-and-stone raw walls, amazing psychedelic lights, high-tech but retro at the same time. Do you remember those mirror spheres that were so common in the 70s? Same concept but made with LEDs, or maybe Lasers. Strange bottles are aligned behind the barman and people left Cyrillic messages on the restroom walls.

Downstairs, a crowded improvised dance floor with a DJ playing Balkan-punk-folk-gipsy-rock-ish stuff and people dancing like crazy, not the least afraid to show everybody their hormonal level, girls included. On the lower bar a board says “Get naked, get a free shot” and I guess somebody actually does every now and then. Everybody knows the songs they’re playing (unbelievable), so they sing out loud while dancing. It looks like one of the resident DJs, probably the local hero, is Eugene Hütz (the man in the picture), which by the way is Alex in Everything Is Illuminated.

As a girl told me, the place is “totally unpretentious” and you feel like you could do anything, like you shouldn’t care about what people think of you. You just get in the flow, dancing and screaming and teasing girls and having huge quantity of fun! Thank you Ale!

Last time I’ve been in Rio de Janeiro I spent my best night at Rio Scenarium, a sort of samba dance floor with real Brazilian live music and a stunning choreography right in the center of Lapa, the historic center of ancient Rio. During daylight, this place is a huge antiquarian’s shop three floors high, with all sorts of things hanging from the walls and from the roof. At night, two thousand people easily fit in to have fun, dance, drink caipirinha and meet people.  Last year this was declared as one of the top 10 bars worldwide by The Guardian.

The setting is so surreal that I first I was speechless, like I were in a different time-space.  Colors everywhere, strange things surrounding joyful people, wonderful traditional music, party atmosphere.  Definitely a must if you happen to travel to Rio.

This week Ferrara celebrates the 20th Buskers Festival. For seven days straight, every night the medieval town center will be invaded by a few hundred street performers coming from all over the world and playing the most amazing instruments and music styles. It’s like the whole town became a giant stage 50 acres wide, surrounded by monuments and typical shops and shared by many parallel concerts. If all those performances were to be executed one after the other, they would continue uninterrupted for over 100 days.

I’m lucky enough to be currently on vacation, so in past few days I have walked the city center several times. Walking through the massive crowd is usually exhausting, not to mention finding a good spot where you can actually see artists in addition to hear them, but since this week the weather has been so-so, there was less people than normal and this helped. The problem is there’s so much to see that I’m completely overwhelmed. I’d like to give attention to many more artists but you either stop listening something or you wander all night without actually listening anything, which is what I want to avoid.

Among the many artists that I have appreciated so far, the most impressive are Gabriel Delta and the Hurricanes from Argentina (latin blues, swing, r&b with Stevie Ray Vaughan influx), The Fellowship of the Strings from Australia (celtic folk, sort of Loreena McKennit meets Abba), Erika Biavati & the Clan from Italy (blues, Mina and more great female voices), Lou-d Cage from Italy (percussions, including improbable home-made instruments and experimental stuff, very funny), The Moonlovers from Belgium (rockabilly), Gitárduál from Hungary (classical music with two acoustic guitars).

See Fabio’s photo gallery for more beautiful pictures.

I love traveling. I love traveling without a detailed plan, without booking rooms, just wandering around and following the flow of my mind. The perfect travel is driving with a Lonely Planet guide in your pocket, a friend to chat with and just a vague idea of where you’re heading to. When you see something interesting you stop. There’s no hurry, no pressure to reach the next target, you can just sleep anywhere there is a room to rent, including places in the middle of nowhere that you didn’t even knew they existed.

This year we’re heading to The Netherlands, but that’s just a vague idea. We can be there in a couple of days, or more if we like to stop somewhere in the middle. And then we could explore the tulip fields in the countryside, the big dams, or just feel tired of that place and continue in Germany, or in France… we’ll see. We leave in one week, but the fun already began, just by looking at maps, reading articles about interesting places and so on. Above you can see a roadmap forecast for the 1st two days.