Music on a mystical place

By Enrico Baggio

I am Enrico, an Italian musician. I play both the acoustic and electric guitar. I love playing slide with my resonator and lap steel guitars. I play mandolino and ukulele too and I like making music in electric and acoustic situations I love shooting videos of me playing in places that have something special, either for their history or natural landscape or their beauty and magic.

Some time ago I filmed a video at Monte Grappa, which is a 1775- meters-high mountain in the region of Veneto, Italy. It was an important place for the Italian history during the First World War. I quote from the vivereilgrappa website: “This mountain, with its steep mountainsides and high crests, is tied to the history of the First World War. Because of the resistance of the Italian Army, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was forced to reinforce the number of its troops on the territory, thus weakening the positions held on the River Piave. These positions were defeated in 1918 during the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The mountain still carries scars and testimonies of that war: it is of paramount importance to preserve the memory of those tragic events. At Cima Grappa the Military Sacrarium (“Ossario”) holds the mortal remains of 23000 soldiers from both armies. Next to the Ossario del Monte Grappa are the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele III, a masterpiece of military engineering, and the Museum.”

If you go there now, you can breathe silence and peace, thinking that many young men came to fight on these lands and lost their lives.

I thought that the song Wayfaring Stranger, arranged with my resopohonic guitar, would have been perfect for that place. The melody and the lyrics of this gospel: “I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger I'm traveling in this world of woe...” and the deepness of the slide guitar were well adapted to the intimacy and peace of that setting.

Shooting in this place was not easy. We started filming at about 7 o’clock in the morning. We were lucky, because it was a very beautiful day and the sky was of an intense blue. Everything was covered with snow. As you can notice in the video, there were no clouds above my head and the Ossario, but you cannot see the plain below, because it was entirely covered by clouds. It was like being on an island in the middle of the sea. There was no one around, just me and the two guys who helped me with the shooting. It took about two hours to get the

whole footage, also because it was too cold to go on playing and shooting and, moreover, people started coming to visit the place. We finished at about 9.30 in the morning and I remember soon after that two Italian Soldiers came to raise the Italian flag.

I recall that, when we finished, we went to the nearby mountain retreat to have a snack and something warm to drink, we needed something alcoholic, I suppose.
I used my National Style O resophonic guitar, it shone brightly in the cloudless blue sky. It was hard to play and record it; my face and my hands were frozen, it was extremely cold and windy. I tried to record with the mic of the cameras and a hand-held audio recorder, but to be honest, I had to do a lot of post production work to obtain a good sound.

Playing in such a special place, so important for the Italian history, was a wonderful, unforgettable and touching experience.
When I started playing, I felt surrounded by something magical and mystical.