Pietro and Roy took some time off from ICBIE campaigning to spend a weekend at an important Italian music festival, because our great mentor, the musicologist and critic Mario Bortolotto, was being celebrated with a series of conferences and concerts: Widmung – A Study Encounter on Mario Bortolotto and Italian Musical Culture. It seemed appropriate to mention this, because some people at the conference (besides Mario, who spent a long vacation in Ribeira a few years ago and will be returning again this winter) are great friends of the ICBIE community, like Guido Zaccagnini and his wife Sabina Sacchi (who will be making their second visit to Salvador later this month), or Guido’s brother, Carlo.
After all the speeches and roundtable discussions, evening concerts of contemporary music punctuated the long, festive dinners (where Pietro and Roy fed all the great dignitaries of Italian music enthusiastic descriptions about life in Brazil, at the ICBIE). Who knows, maybe someday some of them will actually volunteer to offer a seminar? Certainly, the composer Alessandro Solbiati and his wife, the pianist Emanuela Piemonti, showed particular interest in our work.
For Pietro, it was a great kickoff for his return to Brazil on Tuesday!