Today I won’t talk about my real musical origins, it’s too broad a topic, I’ll do it later. Today I’ll focus on an episode that happened at the end of 2000. It was a bit of a rainy day, I had a school visit to a theater that had recently reopened as the “piccolo Ambra Jovinelli,” before it was simply called “Ambra Jovinelli,” near Termini station on Via Giolitti, if I remember correctly.

That day there was a performance about the history of Rock, I remember they talked about Jimi Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius, and other great artists who made history. Until then, I was just a big music fan but I had never been inspired to play an instrument, apart from the Aulos flute during middle school, and I found that really boring.

At one point in the performance, the presenter Rodolfo Maltese (guitarist of “Banco del Mutuo Soccorso”) asked if any of us kids knew how to play an instrument, and from the audience, they started chanting the name of my classmate Sandro who, without much resistance, got up, went on stage and despite the excitement, started playing “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple… sure, he played that riff for about two and a half minutes, but with the excitement that had built up in the audience, those minutes passed pleasantly!

That’s when I had a revelation! I realized that music could give me back the joy of living that I had lost and was struggling to find, I hadn’t had pleasant years, I often found myself wondering what the heck I was living for, then that ray of light broke through the clouds and from then on I started taking lessons from that classmate of mine, Alessandro, and I still thank him today because regardless of how things turn out and all the disappointments I’ve had, music has given me reasons to live. Of course, my motivations as a struggling person have changed over the years, at first it was to show the world that I was worth something, now it’s more for therapeutic purposes, it allows me to exorcise and process moods, situations, pleasant and unpleasant events that I face in life.

Of course, I publish and will publish my songs with the hope that in the future there may also be a financial return, not so much from the songs themselves but from the opportunities that could arise from having them heard around, because I’m convinced that it doesn’t matter to know the right circuits but to please those who know them.

The photo captures the high school I attended at that time and despite everything, I will never be able to dislike that school because that’s where the journey of Raffaele Maggioli, guitarist and then composer, began with Steve Harris as a reference.

Yes, I love A.S. Roma and Iron Maiden!