Since I come here, in this immense Library...

Il fuoco e il racconto. This is the title of the essay by Giorgio Agamben that Capossela cites to introduce one of the central themes of his work as a musician: telling stories through songs. And beyond that, creating an art that brings us together to share stories and create new ones, as oral tradition has always done.

The time of stories interrupts the time of death. Stories manage to halt it for a moment, to suspend us. “Telling a story is always an interruption of mortal time.” It responds to an ancestral desire. Capossela declares himself a great lover of literature for this reason. Like in the belly of Pinocchio’s whale: outside lies the sea, the world, reality made of past and memories. Inside the whale’s belly, however, there is the possibility of something new. Because every story, even one we’ve heard countless times, always brings a discovery.

His book Ecclistica is a logbook, a lunar book, a calendar, an alphabet of the visible and the invisible. It speaks of eclipses and how humanity’s history has always been tied to these astronomical phenomena laden with meaning and myths. Eclipses have accompanied humanity’s destiny since time immemorial: we’ve recorded them, observed them, awaited them. And we continue to do so. They reflect our need for rituals, for dignifying life through what we see and what remains hidden. Rituals, like eclipses—and like the rituals surrounding eclipses—occur at intervals and affect an entire community. They also interrupt time: through the hours, they transcend schedules, much like a concert.

Capossela is fascinated by these phenomena and by what happens in those intervals. They are like festivities, which always carry a strong element of illusion. He says he sees it in the eyes of people at concerts, like the mesmerising effect of a bonfire. The cultural extension of this phenomenon is festivities—those special times, marked dates, where the linearity of time and the chains of cause and effect fold in on themselves to give way to a different kind of experience.

His latest album, Sciusten Feste n.1965, is entirely dedicated to Christmas celebrations. For him, these are like a great masquerade, where we abandon our everyday faces to seek the spark of wonder in the eyes. Like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is also a grand masquerade tied to the Christmas celebrations of its time, where the natural disruption linked to death and resurrection marked a radical change in the order of things.

We are right in the middle of these festive days, and we can only recommend that you let yourself be accompanied by the songs from Capossela’s new album and allow yourself to be carried away by the special magic of taking part in rituals that we create together, and that therefore transcend each of us individually. Gathered around a table, with dishes that remind us of childhood—and of our grandparents’ childhood. These cold nights that tie us to the ancient past of lunar eclipses, that return us to a less chronological and rushed present, and that open us up to the novelty promised by every good story.

Capossela picks up the little red piano we had set up for him on stage, plays a song in Italian that says, “don’t be sad if we’re not together this Christmas”, and afterwards remarks, “With this little piano, we’re paying a good homage to Pascal Comelade.” Then he moves to the grand piano, begins a few chords, and as Marc briefly steps up to adjust a sheet of music, he starts the tune of Non c'è disaccordo nel cielo, a song we all adore. Finally, he invites his guitarist to join him on stage, and together they sing, as the Argentine Mercedes Sosa did, about the change in the simplest, most fragile things that shift along with us: Le semplici cose.