complimenti ⭐🥂⭐✨🍷✨🍷ovviamente De Andre' ci fa un baffo🤣👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼💪💪💪🔥🍷🔥🍷🔥🍷🔥🍷

Magnificently resonating with me. Thank you Michele and Francess

Beautifully crafted collaboration. Fran's lovely piano accompaniment is lovingly adorned with your contrapuntal strings.  Your rich and resonant vocal gives weight to Petrarca's revealing lines about growing old, lines I can now resonate with.

Nice songwriting!! Awesome collaboration!!

Lyrics: Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Music: Michele Ansani & Francess Harris (@pianofran)
Piano: Francess Harris
Vocals, keyboards and electronic strings: Michele Ansani

[Eng lyrics below]

It would actually be a cover, but I do not know whether Petrarch (or others to him contemporary) had also given musical form to the sonnet. For him, the compositions of the Canzoniere (late title) were actually 'Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta'. Modest, the poet. The literature about this introductory sonnet is endless, one can easily start from Wikipedia.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had taken this and other texts from the italian vernacular lyric tradition of the origins, giving them some melodic texture: a normal operation for a student of Literature oriented towards medieval studies and a lover of medieval tunes.
I proposed to Francess (@pianofran - please visit her SC page, full of great piano performances) to play a piano base for this song, and she went much further (as I imagined), with her usual delicate and unmistakable touch, helping to generate a melody and an atmosphere that seemed to me perfectly suited to this very famous poetic composition.

Englsh lyrics (translation by A S. Kline)

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
when I was partly other than I am,

I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials.

Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;

and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world's delight is a brief dream.

Original poem

Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono,

del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono
fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono.

Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;

et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto,
e ’l pentirsi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

---

Cover picture: Anonymous, 'Francesco Petrarca in the Studium', wall fresco, last quarter of the 14th century, Reggia Carrarese, Sala dei Giganti, Padua.

------

Posted on SoundCloud: 2024, September 24.

In rime sparse il suono [Petrarch, Canzoniere - Introductory Sonnet] **

Update (December 9, 2025). 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MagLpl21qdY
I’ve posted the entire suite “In case nothing happens” on YouTube, including the parts (7 and 8) that are still missing here, accompanied by a very simple video.


Hello! I’m a university professor of history who enjoys playing guitar and piano/keyboard, and occasionally composing — unpretentiously, just for fun. I’ve been here for at least 10 years, but only recently have I started using the platform for something other than just external digital storage.
Most of my recordings (made with a KorgD8, Audacity, and more recently Reaper for MIDI and the Spitfire Audio libraries) are entirely homemade and decidedly imperfect. My music includes old songs (all written back in the last century; here I’ve only shared the ones I’ve reworked in recent years) as well as both old and new instrumentals.
Thanks for stopping by and giving something a listen; in the description you’ll often find explanatory notes or translations of the lyrics.

Here I’ve discovered a community of talented musicians and songwriters, and plenty of beautiful music to enjoy. Whenever I like, comment, or repost a track, it’s always the result of attentive listening. For the same reason, I’m not interested in trading empty “likes” without real engagement, and I won’t reply to messages from would-be promoters — follower counts don’t matter to me in the slightest.

Update (2024, September 9). Completed the "AI & (fake) songwriting project". Here: https://soundcloud.com/mick-hansan 

I've posted some 'live' homemade performance here: https://www.instagram.com/michele_ansani/

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