…meeting such important and skilful personalities of the peasant civilization has deeply signed all the work carried out by this group that , for years, has played out a specific role in diffusing and promoting the traditional music in Italy.
The great skill both technical and expressive, reached by the Musicians through a keen and scrupulous research work, derives from the fact that they still continue to frequent the "Maestri Cantori" (Singer-Masters) and even today they want to give proof of that with their new discographic work.

FOLK BULLETIN
Claudio Piccoli-Tiziana Oppizzi
Three Days of popular music Acquarossa (Svizzera)

The "Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo" with their strong scenic presence and a high level sound combination,
have been able to re-create an atmosphere rich of warm mediterranean suggestions so to involve entirely
the stalls.

…on listening to these melodies everybody will understand all the weight of the research-work they carried out,
allowing us to enter and appreciate the poetic world of people we never knew or met, with the purpose of rescuing, somehow, from time what time itself swallows.

The "Musicanti" arrange the songs that are often lacking in musical basis and they record them during their trips from Upper Lazio downwards, confirming that the pieces they execute, regenerate during every live performance; even if the CD doesn't betray the genetic code of their music, it is essentially during performances like this that the Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo are able to trace new ways for those who live the folk and let it live.

AVVENIMENTI
CD "Canti e ritmi dell'Appennino""
Ninnarelle and Saltarelli from
the villages in the Apennines

...a document of extraordinary ethnic value collected in the lands of Molise and Lazio…

CORRIERE DI AREZZO
Sabrina Berti

Flutes, bagpipes, mandolines and reed-pipes for "singing" the stories and loves of peasants.

....the voices so intense and expressive and the lively musical accompaniment have been able to transmit to the audience the feelings and emotions typical of the popular musical tradition; they allow even to overcome easily the difficulties in understanding the dialectal texts and liven up a performance particularly sparkling and involving.

CORRIERE DI VITERBO
Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo
in triumph Full house at the Calanchi Theatre

...the evening has become warmer and warmer at the rhythm of stornelli, saltarelli and tarantelle performed
by the skilful "Musicanti" group up to a sweeping conclusion. It has been an extraordinary success.

UTRICULUS
Dante Priore

….anyway it's on the plane of musical re-invention that the group gets the best and convincing results,
re-elaborating the original thematic material in full liberty but always respecting its original stilistic nature.
We are, so to say, in front of a kind of "Musical Offer" that is likely an "exchange" at a distance with the "holders" of the songs and traditional musics. …even if my approach to the popular traditions has been before and remains now in the sign of philology, I have no difficulty on expressing all my appreciation for the "Folk" re-proposals performed by the Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo.

SUONO
Piero Bottali
Folk Studio Roma

….the Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo, a group that has been carrying out musical researches on the spot
for about twenty years, taking through the Peninsula all the repertory of ancient and traditional music
of central-southern Italy…
...pay attention to the word "re-elaboration", do not think to dancing or rock versions of the country-music because their greatest merit stands just on leaving absolutely intact the meaning and quality of such an agro-pastoral music: no winks, no panderisms to a public looking for easy solicitations.
…the merit, skill, and suggestion of the Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo stand in the fact that they have been able, through the music, to give us back a virile feeling in an epoch of ruling futility.

CUPA CUPA
Giuseppe De Trizio

"Fiore de tutti i fiori" (Flower among all flowers) is the last work of the well-known group
Musicanti del Piccolo Borgo and it is the testimony of the artistic association with the label of the Sun
Theatre of Palermo: it represents a new chapter in the incessant and admirable work of ethnographic
and folkloristic researh that has been going on for over ten years paying always devotional attention to
the poetics of the tradition and of its interpreters.
Even in this CD we can appreciate the cleanness in the sounds and arrangements that have always
marked the technical and expressive ability of this ensemble, able to re-propose us themes of the popular
music with wise counterpoint resolutions.
"Fiore de tutti fiori" is a solar disk, in major key, able to express a total harmony, typical of our nation
where family and narration are the elect topics in the agorà.
All that glitters in the testimonial and iconographic communion of the second CD which completes
this work with the collection of the recordings effected on the spot and then re-proposed by the authors
as a "sonorous memories album".
Therefore, we share Ambrogio Sparagna's introductory hypotheses in which he evidences the constant
link existing between the musicians and their "street masters" with the result of a passionate research
springing from the notes of their "Tarantelle Lucane" and up to the evocative lyric of the "Pastorale di Capracotta" performed with the reed-pipe.