In 1972 Quella Vecchia Locanda played the park at Villa Pamphili in Rome in front of a hundred and fifty thousand people. Two years later they opened their second album with a track named after it, called it The Time of Joy, and then broke up — not over arguments, but because the government banned weekend driving to save fuel and the clubs stopped booking bands. That is the whole story of Italian progressive rock in one paragraph. It is also one of the loveliest records the movement produced, and it was the last thing these six ever did.

The short version

Their second and final album, released on RCA in 1974, five tracks, produced by Rodolfo Bianchi with Leandro Leandri engineering. Giorgio Giorgi sings and plays flute and piccolo; Raimondo Cocco plays guitar and clarinet and sings; Massimo Roselli plays keyboards; Claudio Filice plays violin; Massimo Giorgi plays double bass and electric bass; Patrick Traina plays drums. Everyone sings and three of them arranged it. Almost every piece is co-written by Cocco. The producer picks up a soprano saxophone on one track. Two of the five run past eight minutes.

Villa Pamphili

Half the band had changed. The debut’s violinist was Don Lax, an eccentric American who used to lift a phrase of Bach or Brahms or Corelli and weave it into the arrangements — his description, and as good an account of this band’s method as anyone has given — and he had gone home to the States. Claudio Filice replaced him. The new bass player, Massimo Giorgi, came out of Il Ritratto di Dorian Gray, which was the band of a young Claudio Simonetti before Goblin. What held it together were the three who stayed: Giorgi, Roselli and Cocco. In between the albums there were two years of no records and a great deal of stage work, and one of those stages was the Villa Pamphili festival, with a crowd the size of a city. The opening track here carries its name. By 1974 the audience that had filled that park had changed, and so, quietly, had the idea of joy.

The sound

Chamber music that happens to have a drum kit in it. Quella Vecchia Locanda are the most classically-minded band in Italian progressive rock, more so than any of the famous ones, and the two instruments that define them are the violin and the flute rather than the Mellotron everybody else was buying. Put next to the debut, this is better made — more attention to the melodies, the words and the arrangements, and a genuinely good production — and slightly less alive, which is the trade the band made and the reason the argument about which album is better has never settled. What runs through all of it is a particular melancholy that keeps resolving into sweetness, and a darkness underneath the prettiness that early King Crimson would have recognised.

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The songs

Villa Doria Pamphili opens on piano, acoustic guitar and violin weaving around each other, turns almost baroque as the keyboards come in, and has Giorgio Giorgi giving the best vocal of his career on top — five and a half minutes, and on its own worth the record. It went out as a single. A forma di... is the short one and it ends in a way that a lot of listeners find aimless. The title track is six minutes and the piece the band are remembered by. Un giorno, un amico is the long one at nearly ten, with the producer’s soprano saxophone in it, and it is where the album is at its most conceptual and most modern-sounding — opinions divide here. E’ accaduto una notte closes, eight minutes and something happening in the night, wavering between inspired and merely very good.

Reception and legacy

Then it stopped, and the reason deserves to be better known. The keyboard player has stated it flatly: the band did not split over bad blood. It was the austerity of 1974 — the government’s energy-saving measures closed the roads at weekends, the venues that booked groups worked less, and the money went. An oil crisis on the other side of the world reached into Rome and ended a band. What survives is two albums, both short, both beautiful, both with gorgeous sleeves, and a reputation that has grown steadily ever since. Among people who know Italian progressive rock well, Quella Vecchia Locanda are a password. There are listeners who rate them above PFM, Banco and Le Orme, precisely because they never indulged the excesses the others loved.

The verdict

For the curious, and closer to essential than its obscurity suggests. Start with the 1972 debut, which has the fire; come here for the craft, and for Villa Doria Pamphili, which is as good as anything in the genre. Play that and then the title track. Then Celeste for the same gentleness, Il Balletto di Bronzo for the opposite, and the QVL debut immediately afterwards, because you will want it. A hundred and fifty thousand people in a Roman park, and two years later a fuel shortage. The time of joy was short.

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