Voices from Spoon River — Edgar Lee Masters and Fabrizio De André
There is a hill. It stands at the edge of a small American town, somewhere in Illinois, somewhere in the early twentieth century. Beneath it lie the dead of Spoon River — farmers, lawyers, lovers, dreamers, drunks, and poets. In life they wore their masks faithfully. In death, at last, they speak the truth.
Edgar Lee Masters published his Spoon River Anthology in 1915. One hundred and twenty-four epitaphs. One hundred and twenty-four lives laid bare with brutal tenderness. No heroism, no sentimentality — only the raw, quiet confession of what it meant to be human in a world that rarely allowed it.
Fifty-six years later, on the other side of the ocean, Fabrizio De André listened. And answered.
Non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo (1971) is not a translation. It is a conversation — an Italian poet speaking across time to an American one, finding in the voices of Spoon River something urgently familiar: the outsider, the misunderstood, the broken, the gifted and the damned. De André chose his characters with the precision of a surgeon and the compassion of a saint.
This meeting brings seven of those voices into the room.
Seven voices. Seven confessions. Seven lives that, taken together, form a single, aching portrait of what it means to be human — to want, to fail, to be misunderstood, to disappear
Masters carved them in stone. De André set them to music. Today, we’ll give them back their breath.
Saturday, 19th September 2026
From 10.00 to about 11.30
Babylon Lingue – via Parenzo 9, Rovigo
€ 10 per person – Coffee & Cookies included
